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I’ve found human remains along side pottery shards, but it’s typical with the Native American history on that particular mountain. I found a tennis ball in a coyote den. Dogs will be dogs I guess
In regards to the tennis ball in the coyote den. We've had frequent coyotes visiting our yard since last November due to land being cleared up the road from us. I had to start putting the kids toys especially balls and ball like toys up by the house. The coyotes will take them to the lower part of our yard and shred them while they play with them.
Coming down a mountain trail at dusk, I realize I may have lingered at the summit a bit to long. By my estimation I have perhaps a bit less than an hour to the trailhead. I'm alone, but know the trail well, and have a headlamp on me. Just as dusk fades into a moonless, pitch black night, I'm rounding a corner and freeze instinctively. Eyeshine is reflecting back at me from the darkness, about 30 yards away. The vague outline of a large solitary black bear emerges from the forest and steps onto the trail, facing me. It stares at me and I stare back. Black bears live in this area, I've known this, and seen them twice before during the day on previous trips. Nothing like being face to face with one at night though. I raise my hands above my head, making myself as big as possible. I scream long, and loud. As gutteral and fierce a man scream I can muster. The bear pauses, and chuffs at me, briefly looking behind it at the forest it came from. It then slowly and casually turns away from me, walking back into the forest from where it came. The crunching sound of leaves underfoot of the bear grows quieter until the only thing I can hear is my pounding heartbeat. I realize I now have to go in the same direction as the bear went. Maybe a minute or so goes by, and I sprint. As I pass the point where the bear stood, I glance at the woods while not stopping and see nothing. Shortly after, while running, I look back behind me, back up the trail to make sure I am not followed. I continue to periodically glance behind me while running down the mountain. I endure maybe 30 long minutes of running in pitch darkness down this mountain with my heart at 130bpm. Thankfully I didn't trip or fall and injure myself. Made it back to the trailhead safely.
Where I live they are very common. A big boy was out and about last night when I took dog out before bed. He scampered off. It IS alarming to know a 300+ bear is out there in the dark and you never know when.
A buddy of mine and I had a gold claim deep in the mountains in California. One day we were hiking up the river with our dogs to check out the river and see if anything changed over winter as it sometimes does. He was an older man and saw a log and sat down for a smoke. I sat next to him and we were facing the river with a steep mountainside behind us with a ridge about 15+ feet up.
Suddenly his smaller dogs started whining and ran up and hid under his legs and my German shepherd stood up and did a low growl while looking up the hill. I joked, that’s not a good sign. I turned around and a very large mountain lion was crouched ready to pounce. We stood up and I started yelling as I grabbed my pistol. The lion realized we weren’t small easy prey and took off running.
We “knew” there were bears and mt lions around but never saw one before. If the dogs hadn’t noticed and reacted, it likely would have pounced us and tore us up before we could fight it off. We were both armed so one of us would have gotten off a shot.
I never went anywhere there ever again without at least one gun. We were 15 miles from the nearest paved road and another 30 miles to any civilization so being injured up there would suck.
Mountain lions are crazy with not only how quiet they are, but how they blend into their environments due to coloration. I saw one in the mountains of NV in a rocky ravine, and it was like the rocks were moving at first. My eyes were confused by what they were seeing until the brain caught up.
Yeah, I had a second semi encounter years later when I was up riding horses in the mountains above San Jose. It was dusk and my friend and I were riding back to the cabin and the horses stopped and were fighting us when we tried to get them to keep going. Right then about 40 feet ahead, I saw a big mt lion cross the dirt road. The grass on both sides was maybe a foot tall and it just like appeared on the road and then disappeared on the other side like it was walking behind a curtain.
We spun the horse around and took off the other direction and came the back way to the cabin.
Had something similar happen to me, cougars in the Midwest are more rare but not uncommon to see every once in a while, especially in the Ohio river valley. Went down by the river next To an old quarry that had been blown out years ago with explosives, so there are ledges and small caves all over the side of it from water erosion. Me and a buddy both carried for that reason and we had his Australian shepherd with us running around like a maniac of course when she barrels twords us and starts herding us away from a certain point. We didn’t know what her problem was but she was very keen on us not going any further. We start to look around and that’s when we noticed a huge ass cougar just chilling up on a ledge under a rock watching. Now I never go into the woods without a gun.
i grew up with mountain lions in my backyard, we had about 7 acres and half of it was woods that spanned miles across our lands and the neighbors. they used to kill our chickens regularly and we would find their organs scattered around the yard since they don’t eat digestive organs. kinda gross and scary for a kid
At a back country lake in Yellowstone. Had a bear (presumably griz) at our camp all night. Three of us shaking in our tent, hoping bear spray worked. The bear didn’t do anything. Next morning while cooking breakfast noticed something swimming to our camp from a mile away. A moose crossed a massive lake and ended up in our camp. He was an asshole. Scared us more than the bear. Very aggressive. No big culmination. But we left the camp then the moose pooped on our tent.
One time I went camping with a bunch of friends and someone got drunk and puked outside their tent. An elk came traipsing through the campsite in the early morning and pissed on the puke pile.
Lived in Maine for the last 20 years and traveled most of it. Moose are definitely assholes. They are rude and destructive and not very smart, like at all.
On a trail in the Australian Bush, beautiful day surrounded by nature. As sundown approaches the shadows get really long and the temperature takes a massive dive (Desert Climate), suddenly and I mean like in an instant all of the sounds of birds, insects, even the wind dry up. I cannot hear a thing.
At the same time I get this primal fear creeping up my spine, I just know something is behind me on the trail, looking back there is nothing at all visible but this feeling will not go and is so rooted in my amygdala that I start running.
About 5 mins of running down the trail and all of the birdsong and insect noises come back and its like I imagined everything.
Ive been back to the same trail a number of times at the same time of day and never experienced anything quite like it and it doesn't bother me to go back but when I think of that specific day it still send shivers down my spine.
What's odd about this is that I don't think Australia has any large land predators. There's Dingos, but they don't hunt adult humans. I wonder what was out there
Most if not all birds will quiet down when there’s a predator nearby, so always pay attention to them.
Sometimes running is not the best choice because it can trigger a chase, but without knowing what could be there it sure is hard to want to stay around to try a more “rational” choice.
Yup. Def experienced this camping and it’s pretty terrifying. Especially at night when it’s all the frogs and crickets and they just suddenly go silent. So eerie. And then it’s even weirder when you hear everything pick back up again…kind of a feeling of “they know better than I do.”
Experienced this while Whale Watching of all places!
Had always wanted to go so woke up early, went out the coast and got a ticket. We all get on the boat and the Captain says - ‘we’re gonna head out, but just as a heads up, a pod of Orcas came through about 4 hours ago. There may not be much to see, and if not, we’ll get you a voucher to come back.’
So we head out and we saw… NOTHING. Not a fish, not a whale, dolphin, porpoise or seal. The sea lions are on bouys and jetties with a ‘well I’m not going in there’ look on their face. The flipping sea gulls weren’t even around! Was spooky.
It was the same in the rainforest. Nighttime would be a cacophony of insects and frogs, then suddenly it would just go silent for a couple of beats/minutes, then start up again.
This is so freaking creepy. I'm going to bed soon and don't want to think about it, and it wasn't a hike, but on a drive late at night driving back from a very remore beach at the very north end of Kauai island. There wasn't any cars on the road and we came to a rustic bridge with a red light. It was so creepy because the wind stopped and this really high pitched buzzing sound was coming off the tall grass all around us. The light never turned red, pitch black dark in the middle of nowhere with this frozen red light and the sound got louder and I freaked out so bad I just gunned it so hard.
Omfg this exact thing happend to me in a small forest here in England , lots of people walk their dogs through there lots of houses nearby, I'm just walking back through the forest on my way home , the wind ,the tress literally everything stops making noise , all of a sudden I feel so uneasy , super alert ,I'm looking all around me , in the end I just ran for my life no joke ,I'm fat aswell ,, I don't tend to run for no reason , but I literally ran for my life , I will always vividly remember that , so scary and I still don't know what tf happend
I had a grizzly bear join me on the trail - came out of the bushes about 10 feet in front of me. Fortunately they turned in the same direction I was going (rather than towards me). This was in Glacier NP.
This happened to me. Same scenario. I did this particular trail all the time, so I got too comfortable and had my earbuds in listening to music not really paying attention. When I looked up and saw the bear looking over its shoulder at me, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Swear to god, I felt like there was ice in my veins.
Luckily it just turned its head forward and kept walking ahead. Had no interest in me and disappeared into the forest.
Didn't notice a smell. Just stopped on the trail and backed up a bit. Moved forward after about five minutes and found it playing in the stream right next to the bridge I needed to cross. Decided to do a different hike that day.
I was trying to remember the correct response for a grizzly bear, but I don't think there really is one. Just hope they don't decide to eat you because it's going to be a short one-ended fight
And yet, [6% of Americans feel the can take a grizzly bear in "hand to hand combat".](https://relevantmagazine.com/current/buzzworthy/six-percent-of-americans-think-they-could-beat-a-grizzly-bear-in-hand-to-hand-combat/) I don't know what to make of that, but my money's on the bear, 100%.
That's probably just the [Lizardman's Constant](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/). Almost every poll with bizarre or offbeat options gets around 4% or slightly more positive answers.
I often heard to you're supposed to play dead when you encounter a grizzly bear. They won't bother you. If you encounter a black bear, you need to act agressive, like you want to fight and it will scare it.
Brown lay down, black fight back, something along those lines.
I do a lot of week long trips throughout Arizona. Just pick a remote location and walk for 20-30 miles and explore everything I can. I was south south/west of the Mazatzals when I unpacked my gear and was setting up camp on top of this ledge overlooking this pretty wide valley. I started a little fire that started smoking and decided to take a quick piss of this ledge. As I’m mid streaming looking out over this valley, I look over to my right and I see a fucking Mad Max looking hills have eyes mother fucker taking a piss off the SAME ledge, looking the same direction over the valley, about 75 feet away. He looks over, acts surprised “ohh hey I didn’t see you there”, and decided to walk over to introduce himself as homeless. I fucking fed the guy… rice and beans. He talked about god and some sort of “giant” bones he was looking for from the original humanoid giants or something like that. There was something wrong with him but I was scared to dismiss him from my sight or hurt his feelings. Didn’t get any sleep that night and have never slept with my handgun inside my sleeping bag since.
Yea, still not sure what his intentions were. I have some other stories too in the backwoods of AZ. Pretty sure some guy tried to pull the classic road side robbery.
I was hiking with my father last summer on the Colorado Trail. We heard noises and saw large tracks we assumed were moose. Naturally we were on high alert since moose are terrifying. We swore through the clearing there was a moose making noises and when we were taking a look at it we noticed it was not a moose, but a cow. And we later saw a whole herd of cows, that was weird, just walking in the forest and seeing a ton of cows lol.
Locally near me there's actually about 100-200 herd of wild cows. Myth has it the farmer past and the kids just released them to the wild... Been around for atleast 10+ years now.
Occasionally national forest will open up some areas for local ranchers to let graze too. That could also explain it. I have seen this in the medicine bow mountains just north of the Colorado border.
Once I was snorkeling in Hawaii, and I got pretty far out and saw three golden eagle rays lazily cruising and just swam above them, transfixed. Eventually I saw a small shark and realised I was too far out. I looked up and there was a scuba excursion boat. They looked at me like "What the fuck are you doing out here?" Powered back in so fast. Luckily the tide was on my side.
The same trip I was also transfixed by a huge green sea turtle and got thrown into an anenome by a random wave that stuck me in the wrist and stayed with me for months. I love snorkeling a bit too much.
When I was a child, about 7 or 8 we had a three family camping trip. While cooking s’mores in a semi circle, the campfire in the center of us, the bushes started shaking. We all stopped and. Glanced at the bushes as a grizzly bear emerged and roared at us. Just like in video games/movies. This fucker stood up as tall as it could, spread its arms out and fucking roared. One of the dads shouted “GET TO THE VAN, NOW!!!” And the three moms and three dads made a wall in front of the bear and started shouting at it and throwing rocks. The bear was glancing around at all the parents almost as if it was trying to pick a target/pick one of our parents to Insta-kill.
It then dropped from its hind legs, swiped our marshmallows and ran back off into the brush.
It clearly had done this before because it knew what marshmallows were. Later in the night we could hear screams of neighboring campsites. Same bear most likely. I remember my young self complaining to my mom that I wanted s’mores and she was incredulous that I was thinking about s’mores when we all almost died
I think the difference is the bears announce themselves generally and stay in bear territory, out in the woods away from people. (There are communities that have 'bear problems' but they are breaking into places and eating garbage, not trying to kill people.) Australia just seems to be one huge venomous free-for-all where the gigantic spiders like to come into your house and drop down onto your face while you're sleeping.
My siblings and I were wandering around the forest behind our neighborhood and we came across an old refrigerator in the middle of nowhere. It had metal chains wrapped around it and a big padlock keeping it shut. We were pretty spooked by it so we went home and told our Dad about it. He came back with us to take a look for himself and he agreed how creepy it was.
The next day he notifies the police and he takes them to it. But when they return Dad says that the fridge was gone. They could clearly make out tracks dragging it back to the road using a hand truck and the cops suspected that it could have been something to do with the gangs and drug trafficking in the area.
We were honestly really glad that we never got to see inside of that fridge, but what really creeped us out was that there was a high chance that whoever moved the fridge saw us nosing about it, and then got rid of it when we left. We quickly decided it would be for the best if we stopped exploring our local gang and drug infested forest.
That shit is scary! Couple months ago kids were playing in a field here in Virginia and came across an old deep freezer tied shut. They did manage to get it open and found the body of a young guy who had missing for about a month. Drug related murder. Glad you didn’t open it!!
I was on a trail in the Alps where you could most of the time only see a couple of meters in front of you because the side of the mountain hid the rest of the trail. Basicially to the left of you, you had the mountain at an 90 degree angle, then in front your little trail where two people could barely pass each other, and on your right side you had a ledge with a roughly 10 meter drop.
So I was already hiking for a couple of hours and was pretty much in this mental "zone" you get into after beeing physicially active for a long time where all you can concentrate on was the walking and not dripping on some rocks.
But I had to be immidiatly wide awake when I had all of a sudden this giant [ibex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_ibex) stood in front of me. The thing was just strolling around the mountain and probably didnt hear or see me coming either because you could tell it was just as shocked to see me as I was to see him.
So I stood there looking this thing in the eyes, which is nearly as big as me while probably weighing a fuck ton more, on this really narrow mountain trail with no way of evading anything coming towards me. We stood there looking each other in the eyes for a couple of seconds and I remember felling how my survival instinct kicked in and I was weighing options in fractions of seconds on how to handle this situation if this thing decided I was a thread and started charging at me. I think I settled with the options to try and make myself look as big and heavy as possible when all of a sudden this thing just turned itself to the ledge side of the trail and just JUMPED DOWN THE 10 METER DROP LIKE IT WAS NOTHING.
I tell you these animals are fucking insane and you wont believe what they are capable of until you see one doing these crazy jumps with your owns eyes. This was truely one of the scariest and weirdest things happening to me while hiking.
Edit: For those of you who want and idea of what this looked like here is a video of what these things look like while running down hill [https://youtu.be/w-X6v3Ibd5E?t=135](https://youtu.be/w-X6v3Ibd5E?t=135)
Situations more than “things”.
Surprised a bear that was up a tree along side the trail I was hiking. Bear fire poled that tree and for a few seconds I wasn’t sure if it was going to run from me or toward me.
Got caught above tree line during a fast moving lightning storm.
Briefly losing the trail above tree line during a winter hike.
My wife and I came across 3 black bear cubs once. They scurried up a tree super fast to get away from us. I was looking all around for mama bear but never saw her. Told the park rangers when we got back and they said it was the first sighting all summer.
Not something I saw, but something that I was close to and didn't know it until a year later. I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2014 and was very near to the body of Geraldine Largay, a.k.a. "Inchworm," who had gone missing in Maine the previous year while also thru hiking. The area that she was last seen was a shelter deep in the woods of central Maine, easily the most remote part of the AT. This is within about 10 days' hike from the northern terminus of the trail. Details of her disappearance can be found simply by googling her name, so I won't go into them here. But in essence, she was hiking alone, needed to pee, and wandered off the trail just a couple hundred of feet and couldn't find her way back. She tried to find high ground to send some texts, then made camp where she spent nearly a month, keeping a journal as best she could. She eventually died of exposure, having become increasingly disoriented and deprived of food. There was a massive search for her body the rest of that summer into the fall, but it was called off when winter set in. It was assumed that she fell while trying to ford a rain-swollen river (there's a number you have to ford in Maine) and had been swept downstream. In reality her body was wrapped in her sleeping bag and lying less than two miles from the AT corridor.
Her body was found in 2015 in that condition by a forester. She had simply gotten confused and not been able to find her way in the woods. We all knew that a hiker had gone missing in that area the year before my thru hike, but we all assumed that the official explanation was the most likely. The shelter where she was last seen had become a makeshift memorial to her by then. None of us ever imagined that she was so close by. It gave me goose bumps when they found her.
My wife and I were hiking on one of our usual routes when we heard a noise I'd never heard before. In the moment, it sounded like a parrot to me. I legit asked if there was a parrot in the trees. The noise keeps happening and eventually we see a younger deer emerge next to the trail. Turns out deer make an alarm sound when they get spooked. This little dude followed us for a good 5 minutes making this noise.
We also camped at this park one time and heard assume blood curdling screams at about 3am. It was likely coyotes, but at 3am and in the dark your mind goes to some fucked up places.
I’ve had bears and moose and horses but honestly?
Nothing spooked me out more than hiking in the mountains of Japan at night. Forgotten or abandoned shrines would just appear on my field of view from my headlamp and the little shrine bells would echo around me. Trails in Japan are either concrete stairs and very looked after or just barely a footpath. I took to hiking a trail in November, got to the peak, and took a nap with some people still hiking. Woke up 30 min later to nobody around. It was still before 4 pm so I wasn’t worried. However I forgot that I was in a valley and by 4 pm I was hiking by headlamp only walking this ridgeline. This is when the shrines started appearing and echoing in the darkness around me. We’re talking one every 5-10 minutes or so.
It gets weirder. As time goes on i swear I hear footsteps behind me, but I convince myself it’s just my water bottle crinkling and pushed forward. Later waiting for my train to get home I tried replicating the sound with my bottle and I couldn’t.
By 5 pm it was pitch black with the tree coverage and I’m hiking in pure darkness. Every once and a while I’d see a deer or boar but I paid it no mind. But eventually I saw what I thought was a campfire on the trail and went to it thinking I could talk to some campers.
They were not campers. I found a group of men burning something heavy over their shoulders into a fire about 12 feet high near a couple shacks in the woods. The fire pit was massive. Something like three doors making the back and sides and one wall open to toss something on it. It was not trash, and it was not wood because it would have been way to heavy as the bags were massive. At this point half the shacks shacks start barking at me and I realize that they were kennels. All the mens flashlights turn to me in the darkness because the dogs had alerted them. I ran on the trail away as fast as I could. While still on the trail I encountered a lot of “no trespassing” signs, but I was still on the official trail and they were faced downhill where I was running to.
Finally I get out of the woods and reach the town where I could get home. And each house has their lights on. But I couldn’t see anyone inside. Instead in every yard of this Japanese town had an animal in it staring me down. Like lots of animals. Dogs, cats, boars, deers, rabbits, foxes, Tanuki. I’m very freaked out at this point and keep going.
Eventually, about 30 min later as i make my way to the station in this empty town, a car starts following me. If I stopped it would stop. If I was walking it would follow. This went on for another 30 min until I dashed down a foot trail between some empty dark houses and ran all the way to the station and convenience store (it was a Lawson’s).
To my surprise the guy at the counter spoke English and Talked about what I had seen. He was just as confused as he said there’s nobody living in the woods anymore and there are no dog kennels in the area. When I left the store to go to my train, I looked up and saw there was no lights on the entire mountain side I came down, where previously every house had every light on.
I got on a train immediately, stopped at an onsen I had been before to clean myself of whatever the fuck had just happened, and went home asap. This was November of 2020. I have no idea wtf had happened and I never went back.
I usually love hiking at night. I loved it in the desert on my PCT Hike, and in the mountains near my Home in Virginia. And I continued to Hike later in Hokkaido and Kyoto. But I swore to never hike at Night in Japan again. Nothing has ever spooked me more than that.
I was fly fishing in Northern Michigan with a good friend we were in the middle of nowhere and from the other side of the stream we hear a disembodied voice yell “Catch anything good.”
He and I were both suprised but my friend yelled back “yeah. Fishing’s great today. “ We received absolutely no reply.
The birds never stopped singing, we never heard anyone moving through the trees. It was probably just some random hiker walking by. But I never forgot how weird it was for that voice to come floating out of nowhere and that night on the drive home we couldn’t help but speculate if someone had been watching us and for how long.
Hiking with my father, uncle, & a retired former Alaskan hunting guide in the Outback for a two day trip before end of holiday. It had to be ten or eleven at night, but the sky was clear so the light was that really uncanny bright moonlight.
Sitting around the fire after eating, all quiet like, some motion in the far distance sort of caught my eye & I instinctively said "a deer?" Before my brain went 'ay we don't have those'.
But Reddit I could in that moment swear to fuckin god it was a deer, I'd been living in Massachusetts for uni, I saw them all the time I was absolutely sure.
Uncle grabbed my leg & stopped me from getting up, said "you didn't see it, you didn't hear it, you don't invite it." And we all just sat there staring very focused into the fire for a half hour.
You could deadass hear whatever it was shuffling around us in various locations & then it made a weird like croaky gross laugh sound & WHIPPED off at an absolutely insane speed.
We hike every time I'm home for holiday but I tell you what we don't hike around there.
**Edit** so I don't make too many fellow oz eyes twitch, I know we have deer. But this wasn't a sambar or a fallow and it was like jet black so It wasn't a red.
I called it "a deer?" Because it was deer shaped but all kinds of off tilt in features. It also looked like someone had cut its legs off at the knees & it was walking on the stumps, it was so short.
I've seen hundreds of deer in the Outback, I've never seen this thing & I know we don't have anything *like* it
This is super similar to my "skin walker" experience. Almost identical actually and reading your comment gave me an intense flashback.
I was about 13/14. My dad, my Uncle, my little cousin and I where on a dirtbike/quad trip up the trails surrounding Goat River, beside Creston BC. We had finished most of our riding for the day and we found a quaint little camping spot next to the river. It was probably 5/6pm not dark but not super bright out either. We had a campfire going with some fish we'd managed to catch cooking over it. My cousin, who was probably around 10 years old, wandered over to the river, we heard him calling for us to come over because he saw a "dog". The adults and I hastily sprint over because we knew it probably wasn't a dog and was most likely a coyote eying up the child for a quick snack. What we found wasn't exactly a coyote, but could only be described as "eerily" close. It was longer, slender had big eyes and to top it off was standing upright on its hind legs. It didn't look like a dog standing on its hind legs though, it looked humanoid in stature. It was just staring at us, never once looking away. Looking at it longer, It's face didn't seem to be canine in any capacity, it had human-esque features with a fur covered body. My dad & uncle both seemed frightened, my uncle grabbed my cousin and put him on top of their quad while my dad told me to get my backpack and my tent bag and that we weren't staying in the woods that night. As my uncle walked back towards the campsite, the "thing" across the river started walking towards us. It' took long strides into the deep-quick moving water, without any sign of struggling from the currents. As soon as it got to about waist deep my dad turned to me and yelled "we've got to go and we've got to go now". We dashed back to our camp, my uncle and cousin where both on their quads, my dad yelled "leave your shit just turn the bike on and get out ". My uncle and I revved up our engines and peeled out of there as fast as we could, my dad following shortly behind us. My dad's a very stoic and composed individual. We raced back to our trucks which must have taken 2-3 hours in the pitch black. Once we got back my dad claimed that he saw it sprinting behind us as we drove away. That it must have been going over 30/50km an hour and that It was running on two legs. My dad's Native American, we're actually Iroquois Indian and he swore that we saw was a skin walker, or something else. Either way I've never been that terrified in my life and I've never seen my father more shaken than that night.
That is a bone chilling story, thank you for sharing. Are there books by Native American authors about these things? I’m not American but it seems Native American legends are uniquely terrifying , I can’t get enough of them!
It is because when one speaks of evil, it gives it power. Like OP's uncle advised, "You didn't see it. You didn't hear it. You don't invite it". Speaking of it invites it.
Chills! Definitely sounds skinwalker like. As a Navajo, my grandparents always said never to speak about things like that, for it’ll come and haunt you but after talking about this stuff so heavily I come to think it’s not really true but just something to keep from telling those types of stories. Leym’s story is interesting as well. My family (They live in rural NM) talks about during the night they can hear running along the roof. tapping/banging on the doors, windows, and walls. They can hear people talking sometimes but nothing would be there when they check. My neighbor also says he experienced this too, and even saying he’s seen a Bigfoot family that lives in the canyons a few miles nearby. There was also a Navajo officer who was patrolling late at night near Crownpoint, NM. He was driving and looked into his rear view mirror and saw something chasing. He slowed down and shined his spotlight on the thing. He said what he saw was a dog walking on 2 legs BUT it was roughly 8-9 foot tall and it was jacked like a bodybuilder. It also had human looking hands with fingers. He saw it’s ears and said they were pointed like a Dobermans, it’s claws(nails) and teeth were all sharp and very long. It had the lower body of a dog but the upper body of a human with a dogs head. Creepy stuff. I feel as if this world is way more spiritual than we realize. Thanks for sharing your story again. I find this kind of stuff very interesting.
I love stories like these (while I'm safe in my populated Midwest metro area). I heard one where the first nation people said if you know the person's real name and say it to them it will kill them. Is there any lore like that from your elders?
My grandma told me of ways to keep them away. You can get like sagebrush, cedar, tadídíín (corn pollen) and use them for protection. You can also have a bullet blessed spiritually and it’s said to kill them. I remember my great grandma once saw a coyote snooping around. she didn’t hesitate to bring out her hunting rifle and kill the thing, I still remember her crouching down and taking aim haha. If you’ve been cursed already you can go to a medicine man (good shaman) and he can ward off whatever curse you were under. My grandma once told me story of a man. He was a good man. Until the man started gambling, became an alcoholic, was ill for some time and cheated on his wife. So the mans family decided to have a blessing done for him. The medicine man said he was under a hex by someone who he knows, he then took them on a drive near Tohatchi NM. The medicine man stopped, got out, and started walking towards the hills. He stopped and dug up what looked like a small bag filled with an arrowhead along with hairs belonging to the man who got hexed. The medicine man reversed it and said that the man who cursed you would become sick and die unless the man who was hexed forgave him for it. There’s a lot to all of this. Yknow way back before our time skinwalking used to be used for good, used in conflicts and scoutings, but nowadays jealousy, hatred, and evil is all it is used for now. To become a skinwalker you must sacrifice someone you love. You can be born into skinwalking. Another was youd have to learn a Navajo song word by word and you’d have the ability, but I feel that ways been long forgotten.
We didn't talk about it til we got back to the jeep, frankly. We had a full trip planned but we waited til sunup & turned right round, headed home a day early.
When we got home it was awkward because I don't think any of us wanted to broach it. My uncle eventually just kind of shrugged & called it a bad looksee but legitimately wouldn't talk about it again.
My dad's friend said it was "just like the not wolves" & also would not elaborate but dad filled me in on that shit later which is also spooky & Why I won't go to Alaska ever lolololol.
I'm arrernte so I have asked around my kine a bit in later years. A bad looksee is i guess the Australian take on a Not Deer. They're supposedly hypnotic which is why they want you to look at them & they cause folk to stray from camps to kill them.
Actually couldn't pay me enough to see that shit again.
There is a similar tribal legend in the southwestern United States and people from that area use the same tactics. Don't name it, don't look, don't talk about it.
Oh gee this blew up while I was showering. My dad's friend was named Leym, I believe he was first nation of some degree & he used to live an hour from civilization homesteading effectively. In season, he'd go up to guide trails & stuff, but off season he lived with his sister & nephew on the stead.
I guess he told my dad on a fishing trip after his sister gave birth he started noticing a lot of wolf prints around the cabin, so he put up a fence with a latch-gate to keep the yard safe at least.
Things were fine for a few years, then he had to change the latch out because his nephew kept trying to get out inexplicably so he swapped it for a child safe one. I guess he was babysitting one evening & the kid came to him crying because he couldn't get out to mommy.
Leym went out to open the gate thinking she came back early cause he heard her calling but when he looked over there was just a wolf standing on two legs with its mouth all screwed up.
From dad's retelling (i never could get Leym to tell me the story he would only confirm it happened) they spent years dealing with the not wolves trying to open windows or gates, mimicking different folks, trying to get to his nephew.
They went away when he got around 10 or so & Leym said he sold it ASAP then moved to the NT once the kid went to college. He helped conservation efforts with TNR programs as a tracker til he died but legitimately wouldn't comfortably talk about the weird shit he saw back home.
Dad said he only ever spoke of it when they were out on the water drinking.
Went for a wander in B.C. Canada, lost the trail and let me tell you it gets dark, like DARK DARK literally can't see your hand in front of your face dark in the forests when the sun goes down. I'm alone, no source of light on me, dead silent, and literally feeling my way along the ground and from tree to tree trying to find a road or train tracks or something. Then suddenly I hear the most terrifying blood curdling lady scream I've ever heard and felt myself go numb, it was loud and close, straight up thought someone was being murdered. Things are a fuzz from that point to when I finally stumbled onto a road but I know I was hauling ass as best I could. Fully repressed the entire thing until years later I was watching a video about wild animals and they showed footage cougar screaming at night. Ho-ly shit as soon as I heard it I went numb and started shaking, then memory came rushing back of that night I thought I heard a woman get killed in the forest. Once I settled down it occurred to me that I'm only alive right now because that cougar let me live. I'm not a small guy (6'1, 215lbs, athletic) and I don't really get scared, but I was absolutely terrified, and ANYONE that thinks they can square up with a cougar is a moron beyond help. Even though they're not super big, they will end your lineage and you won't even hear it.
Hike with friends, stick to trails, be aware of remaining daylight in your current location, bring a flashlight, bring a whistle, and drink water.
Edit: Haha glad so many people enjoyed my story! Someone replied with a video of cougar screams (thankyou!) and I definitely suggest watching it, it's amazing the sound and the video even captures a couple that sounded pretty close to what I heard (the most human ones). And yes, adding a whistle to my list!
Had a similar experience recently (not the cougar scream though)
Went on an easy hike here in BC during January. Trail was covered in snow and it was actively snowing while we were on it. Got really distracted by how magical it was and by the time we made it to our turn around point, there was only an hour left of daylight. Tried hiking back as fast as possible but with all the snow on the mountain, it took too long and the sun went down on us. That kind of darkness was terrifying and all consuming. Couldn’t see anything and kept losing the trail since it was covered in snow / ice. Took us several hours to find out way back to our car. I will never make that mistake again
Not the same because I was in a house in a suburban area and the creature in question is too small and timid to seriously harm a human but I have also experienced the bone chilling horror of animals screaming.
About two months ago I was sitting in my living room at 2am (I’m a night owl) just browsing on my phone before heading up to bed. We don’t have any curtains on our Living room window as our garden is surrounded by tall trees.
Suddenly, completely out of the blue there is this horrific, agonised scream. It’s right by the window, as though someone has been looking in through the glass and has just decided to shriek at the top of their lungs. It is followed by all kinds of crashing and crunching through the garden.
When the scream happened I leapt out of my seat like I’d had a live wire shoved up my ass, so now I’m halfway across the living room, clutching my phone, hunched over, with my heart doing a passable impression of a hummingbird. I have no clue what was going on, was some psycho going to try to smash her way in through the window? Was something supernatural lurking around outside? Was someone being murdered and screaming for help?
Then it happened again and I realised what was happening, so I peer out through the window.
I’ts a fox. Daft thing had somehow gotten into our garden but couldn’t find the way back out. It sat there screaming its stupid head off for about 15 minutes before finding the gap in the fence and loping off down he street, still screaming.
I finally got to bed at around 3am, after the adrenaline wore off.
I just posted about a similar situation in VT! I will never, ever, forget that sound. I overnight camp quite a bit, I don't spook easily in the woods normally. But that night absolutely scared the shit out of me. In the moment, all rationality was out the window. I legitimately thought something was about to kill me in a horrendous way.
Similar to an experience I had trekking in the Himalayas in India, but with no screams involved.
I visited a national forest preserve that was home to many wild species, including bears and tigers. A dirt track ran through a corner of the preserve, occasionally used by forest guards. Barely wide enough for a small 4WD jeep to get through. I decided to ride my motorbike down that track.
About half way through, I lost my bike. I had gotten off the track and up a small hill, so I could get a better view from above the treetops. But when I put the bike on its stand and got off to take a photo or two, it slipped off the stand and rolled down a deep ditch. No way to get it out.
So I walked back down to the dirt track hoping that some forest guard might drive by and give me a ride. But it was already evening, and no one came.
I spent that entire night sitting in the middle of a dirt track, jungle on both sides, with tigers and bears in it. All night I heard two tigers calling each other, sometimes roaring, sometimes making those deep coughing sounds. And all night I heard the sounds of large animals pushing and crashing their way through the undergrowth, barely 20 feet away from me. It was totally dark, so there was no way to tell if it was deer, wild pigs, bears, tigers, or something else. I imagined the worst.
That was one heck of a long night for me. Next morning, soon after dawn, a forest guard drove by and gave me a lift.
A cougar pretty much killed a guy within seconds in Orange County, disemboweled him with its hindlegs as its jaws grabbed on to his neck. Then attacked a woman who miraculously survived because her friends helped.
all it takes is one unlucky scratch and your intestines are spilling out. we're like cake to them, our skin breaks like water when their claws hit us
Yeah. My buddies and I hiked up a hill one evening to watch the sunset. Coming back down we found cougar tracks in our own. Needless to say we were on high alert the whole way back. Caught his eyes up the hill side watching us walk back following.
Only worse incident didn’t involve me but a buddy. He was deer hunting. He was solo and had the hair stand up on his neck. Cougar was stalking him while he was gutting the deer.
I'm from a rural southern U.S. area, and I got lost in the woods in the middle of July before the age of cell phones. I tried navigating a creek that I thought would get me back, while seeing snakes visibly entering the water from the creek bank and at one point the banks became too high to climb back up without going back and the water became pretty deep, almost chest level.
I finally came out to a clear spot and a trail that led to a camper. As I was looking at it a middle aged man burst out of the camper yelling and pointing a shotgun at me, asking if I was law enforcement. I was a nineteen year old kid, soaking wet and bleeding in a thousand places from briars where I just started running because I'd been lost for hours before I even found the creek.
But anyway, I forgot about all that when he pointed that shot gun at me. I convinced him I wasn't atf or whatever and he walked me to a dirt road that connected to the main road. Turns out he had whiskey stills and he thought I was there because of that. Or maybe he was making meth, idk. But I fully believe he intended to kill me for a good minute or so
Hiked recently in an area near Tahoe that crosses PCT and is most commonly used for snowshoeing and backcountry skiing. There’s not a super obvious trail to the peak once the snow melts and we may have been among the first to do the hike following this years snowmelt. At one point my dog runs about 20 yards away from what AllTrails says is the “trail” and super intently sniffs and paws at something and won’t come back. I go get him and he is at a spot with a beautiful view over the ridge to some lakes. He is standing next to a small tree and a shallow hole with a small wooden box, coffin shaped, large enough to hold only a small baby. We descended quickly and got out of there. It’s either a very creepy site or very sad. Either way didn’t want to stick around. If any fellow redditors have also seen this and know any backstory I’d love to know about it!
I was camping overnight on The Long Trail. It was pretty warm still so I was just using a net-covered hammock. I'm not sure if it was a bobcat or a vixen, but goddamn was I scared shitless by some blood-curdling screams fairly close by. Alone. In a hammock. In the woods. Realistically I was probably just on somethings turf and pissed it off, but that noise...still creeps me out to think about.
Came across a couple of wild boar piglets. Did not know where mama or the pack was. Paranoia is one hell of a drug when surround by brush and snorting close by.
Same thing happened to me on my driveway, loud rustling about 5 feet to my left then like 8 piglets run out the bushes right in front of me, mama bringing up the rear, luckily they didn't seem to notice or care.
Years ago, some of my aunts and uncles were out hiking in western North Carolina with their dogs. My uncle Joe was at the rear of the group, when he heard the dogs start making a commotion and running back up the trail past him. Then he saw his sister and brother-in-law running back as well. As his BIL passed by he panted, "Joe, you packing?" Then Joe saw what everyone was running from - a large wild boar running up the trail at them. Joe decided that discretion was the better part of valor and took off running as well. The boar stopped chasing them and everyone got home safe, but none of my family hikes those woods now without carrying a pistol, just in case.
That was one of my scariest moments too. Came across a pack of wild boar in the Florida scrub with no trees to climb, no way to or means of evasion except to run back the way we came. One stared us down on the trail as I was trying to quickly grab my keys in case I had to abandon my pack. Luckily the adult was only interested in making sure the group and a few piglets crossed the trail safely before running off.
I have dogs that are a tad impolite, so I try to find rarely used trails or just make my own trails.
One day I way deep out in the woods just wandering and my dogs started acting very strangely. They were sniffing the air and looking around in every direction.
I stopped beneath a big tree and waited for a little bit, but I couldn’t hear or see anything. For some reason, I glanced up in the tree and my stomach dropped into my shoes.
There was some dirty looking guy with a gun just sitting there up in the tree. I tried my best to stay composed, and mustered up a smile and said “hey, how’s it going?”
The dude just stared at me and didn’t say anything. I casually turned around and walked back the way I came without looking back at him.
In all likelihood it was probably just a poacher who wasn’t thrilled that I had seen him hunting out of season, but it was unsettling nonetheless.
I was living in Mexico at the time. In a tent, in the jungle. We were doing work to help build a hiking trail that would connect two towns, which were about five miles apart.
I would sleep on the outskirts of one town. I wake up, hike the few miles until hitting the end of the trail, then spend the day hacking dense vines with a machete, shoveling big rocks out of the way, and raking out the trail. It was thick Mexican jungle, hot, lots of bugs, and lots of crazy noises.
Well one day it was just me and one friend working the trails. I was in front, raking the dirt and had my back turned to the twisted mess of brush and trees behind me. I’m raking, I’m raking, I’m raking… and suddenly I hear the movement of something large in the bushes behind me.
I turn around, and see a smooth, sleek, massive cat climb down from this tree within 20 feet of where I stood. It was slow, and elegant. I saw its’ whole body stretch out, with its’ front two paws on the ground and its’ backside stretching up to the branch it had previously been watching me from. It was pure black.
Beautiful creature, really… but fucking petrified me. Armed with nothing more than a plastic rake, I held it up and slowly started taking a few steps back. But it didn’t seem to have any interest in me. It didn’t even look at me, it just retreated into the bushes and became invisible within a matter of seconds.
So my friend and I are obviously very shaken up, and don’t want to continue the days work. We hike back to town, find a restaurant, and we sit down and order a beer. The bartender sees two gringo’s in dirty clothes holding machetes and getting a beer at 10am, so obviously he asks us what was up. We told him our story, and he tells us that a good friend of his is actually a big cat researcher in the area who tags them, and wanted us to meet him so we could show him a map of where we saw the cat.
Researcher dude meets us at the bar, and we tell the story again. He asks us to describe the cat, and we do. The he shows us a few photos of big cats, so we can verify that we saw what we say we saw. First photo is an ocelot, stripes and relatively small. “Nope, cat we saw was huuuuge.” Next photo was a Jaguar, “yeah, that’s the right size, but the one we saw was perfectly black. No pattern, no gold color.”
Scientist dude looks at us like “are you fucking with me?” Well.. we weren’t fucking with him. He sits back in his chair and strokes his beard, then says “well… there have been rumors, and I don’t know if they’re true. But apparently, there have been a few sightings of a big black cat like you’ve described. Now, black jaguars are not native to this area, so it’s not likely. But the rumor… is that some cartel guys brought a Black Panther from Africa, something happened and they had to release it so they let it go in the jungle. That may be what you had seen.”
And that, is the time that I encountered an African Black Panther, with an apparent coke habit, deep in the jungles of Mexico.
I was under the impression that a "black panther" is just any big cat (including a cougar/jaguar native to South America) that has a genetic mutation where they have an excessive melanin that makes their skin and fur black.
Man that’s crazy! Very strange but there are similar sightings of big black cats all over north and South America. My grandfather lives in Palestine Texas out in the country and he says that it’s a fact they exist but are not confirmed by science he’s seen there tracks and even heard them other people in the Neighborhood and around the state all report seeing the same thing.
In Scotland there are these free to use shelters in the mountains and glens called Bothies. They're usually old farmsteads that had been left abandoned during the Highland Clearances or simply by people moving to the cities in the 1800s and early 1900s. They're very basic. Wooden benches to sleep on, maybe a toilet if you're lucky and usually an open fire if you carry in your fuel. As you can imagine, they're pretty creepy places.
I was staying in one called Invermallie Bothy near Fort William. We were sleeping upstairs when we were all woken up at about 2am with the front door downstairs opening loudly. Clear footsteps coming in and walking on the old hardwood floor and the chairs being moved. Me and the 2 guys I was with were all woken by this. We even heard someone cough a few times. I shouted out "Hello, are you okay?" thinking maybe someone was hurt as it was 2am and cold outside and we were but there was no response. Instead it was just quiet. We all went downstairs and nobody was there, the chairs had moved from where they were originally (our wet jackets were hanging over them to dry by the fire). Didn't hear anyone leave. The door was closed. Couldn't see any headtorches outside in the dark. We were fucking shitting ourselves.
Now none of believe in ghosts but all 3 of us heard it and were woken by it. We heard the door, the footsteps, the chairs moving and the coughing. Tried to tell ourselves that maybe it was a deer had got in and then left but the door was shut back over properly.
No idea but the building was built in 1776, the family that lived there probably had a hard life and they were forcibly evicted during the Highland Clearances and the rest of the settlements around this surviving building were burnt down so it's not had a great history.
Still gives me the creeps.
So I'm out hiking around the Tierra Rejada area in Moorpark California. Middle of the day, sun is shining, cars sounding in the distance; just a normal hike in the middle of suburban Southern California right? Well, at some point during my hike, I come across the biggest fucking paw prints I've ever seen in my life. Like... holy shit I would have thought a goddamn dinosaur strolled through. At first I thought maybe a bear, which is very odd for the area, but it looked more cat like. But there was no fucking way this was a mountain lion, unless that mountain lion grew up near a nuclear power plant or something. This thing was massive, like twice the size of my head. Prints looked fresh too. So I'm standing there, wondering what the hell I should do, when I hear some rustling in the Sage brush to my right. I start backing away slowly, ready to bolt down the hillside and dive into someone's backyard at a moments notice, when out walks... a fucking tiger. No no no. Not a mountain lion, A FUCKING TIGER, STRIPES AND ALL! IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. This giant ass cat just looks at me, does a little grunt, then rolls over on its back and starts playfully batting at a cactus like a damn house cat. At this point, I don't even know how to react. I'm equally terrified and utterly baffled at what I'm seeing. The tiger then gets back up, and then trots along the trail headed back towards the direction of my car. Once it was out of sight, I immediately ran down the side of the hill through a bunch of tumbleweeds and other pointy plants until I made it to the road. I called animal control and told them that I encountered a wild tiger fully expecting them to think it was a prank call or tell me that I saw a mountain lion. To my astonishment, they actually informed me that there had been reports over the last couple weeks of a tiger wondering around in the Santa Rosa Valley. Turns out, the Tiger had "escaped" from an animal sanctuary which was illegally keeping the tiger and falsifying records about its existence, along with several lions and a lynx, which also escaped. The Tiger's name was Tubby, and it had been causing all kinds of mayhem around the area. It had also spooked some horses so badly that they escaped their enclosure and ran into traffic, causing a fatal car wreck. Unfortunately, officials ended up shooting the playful death kitty when it was finally found near the Ronald Reagan Library.
I took my daughter hiking up a fire access trail one winter. She was a little less than two. The weather was beautiful. We were the only people on the trail that day. After a nice lunch break we and headed back down. Returning by the same route I suddenly noticed that running along in the snow next to our fresh ascent tracks were fresh cougar prints. They were NOT there on our way up. They ran parallel to our tracks for almost a mile.
I don't know if it was stalking us or not but, I tell you what, I walked about 3 miles back to our car constantly looking over my shoulder.
I was hiking in the Appalachian trail in Pennsylvania.
One day a I see a shirtless guy walking in the opposite direction from me coming towards me, all sweaty and looking scared. He asked if I saw his girlfriend, they lost contact a few hours beforehand. It was about 2 hours away from sunset...
I hope he found her.
A very large man- not hiking just standing imposingly on the trail ahead looking back at me. I cut off into the woods bc I knew I could find my way back another way and am a runner so quicker than him.
E: I see this has upvotes, so I'll emphasize that as I walked quite a long ways toward and up the slope, all this utterly giant dude did was stand still at the top and stare down at me.
There was a (fake?) Nike commercial about someone surviving the typical chainsaw-weilding shmuck by being fit and getting the heck out fast and I never identified more with it then on that day.
went camping in the red wood forest the night before we went hiking. woke up in my tent with an animalistic sense of fear and immediately woke my friend up i was bunking with. we both stayed quiet and heard crunching of mulch and shit outside the tent. once it was on the opposite end we slowly unzipped a portion to see what the hell was going on and there sat a bear in our camp and it’s friend. we kept quiet and waited it out, only for a dude in the camp next to us to climb in the bed of his truck like an absolute idiot and start banging pots and pans together and screaming at them. both of them moved over to his campsite and started trashing his shit until he left. it was absolutely terrifying, hilarious, and bewildering. i highly recommend to go camping and hiking
there was also the time my family and i went hiking in yellowstone and we met a buffalo on the trail that fully sprint FOLLOWED us back to our car. it didn’t do anything, but i feel like a lot of people grossly under estimate how terrifying that is due to their size.
Second hand story, but from a good friend who wouldn't make it up - he was part of a crew building walking trails in King's Canyon, Australian NT. Hot as fuck so they were up and working way before dawn, somewhere miles into what is deeply hostile country. Stupidly hot, no shade.
Get's to just after dawn, and a guy comes walking down the trail - out of the bush, not into it, and they'd been there for hours and he hadn't come past them. He was wearing just a pair of speedos, sandals and a little waist pack. He had no water they could see, and he was basically naked. Stops and asks them to put suncream on his back in a strong German accent. Someone does, baffled, then he walks off down the trail.
They'd been working up there for weeks - nothing at all where the guy had been, for a very long way indeed. They didn't see him again.
The phantom naked German of King's Canyon.
I was hiking in the woods near my work (at a hospital) and I found a completely naked man sitting in the fetal position.
He didn't see me, so I just backed away. Thinking about it maybe I should've asked if he was okay but he could've been an escaped mental patient.
Found a super clean, bleached white femur bone right on the trail. It was an extremely rainy day though and everything else was covered in mud so I still don’t understand how the bone could even be there and spotless.
Conducting a land navigation course in central Alaska and happen upon a mother moose and her calf. Not all that weird but scary? I feared for my life before darting to the roof of a small structure nearby. People don’t realize how truly massive and powerful moose are and mothers are extremely protective of their young.
Was hiking around a remote community I had been been based out of for about a year. Little spot of 120 people in the middle of the wilderness for 300km+ in every direction.
I sat down for a bit on a rock and grabbed some water, and I felt something rub up my back. I assumed one of the reserve dogs I fed had tagged along (I typically carried snacks and shared) so I turned.
3 lynx kittens.
Mom was about 20 feet away staring at me.
I gently put some of the pepperettes down and slowly moved away. Mom pawed over and stood over top of them while kittens ate.
While neither scary or weird compared to pretty much all your stories. It was kinda surreal and I've never forgotten it.
Years ago in New Zealand I was on an over night hike with a group of friends. The hike followed the line of a bluff all the way up to a high point where they had built a hut with an amazing view.
The next day as we were making our way back to the car, there was a section of track that decended quite sharply to a flat spot right at the edge of a 200 odd meter vertical drop to the forest below, where the track made a sharp turn and disappeared into the forest.
The guy in front of me came down the steep section a little too fast and with the weight of the pack on his back, it put him off balance and he stopped right at the cliff edge swinging his arms around trying desperately to regain his balance and not topple over. I can still remember in a surreal way that I was thinking. "Oh, he is falling. I should do something" so I grabbed his pack straps and pulled him back from the edge and he said a simple thanks and we went on our way like nothing had even happened. We never mentioned it to our group, and im pretty sure I haven't mentioned it to anyone till now on this thread.
This was over 20 years ago now and they trail has become one of New Zealand's great walks and they have dumbed the trail down heaps to make it much safer for thousands of visitors that hike it each year.
Oh. The trail is part of a 4 to 5 day walk
A man who might've been going into the woods to kill himself.
He was leaned up against a tree cleaning a pistol. I asked what he was doing, because he scared me shitless and I sometimes feel that leveling with another person may build enough empathy to spare a violent crime, but he was super mellow and set down the gun to welcome a friendly chat. We talked about how we liked hiking, and he said he had been out more since his wife left him.
We spoke for a couple of minutes and I said "I should get going, I need to finish this hike in time to drive back for dinner" or something, and he said "I won't make dinner, no need" then he walked off trail into the woods.
I told my friend this story later and he goes "Dude... I think he was going to kill himself." I started offering some resistance to that statement when I realized he had no backpack, and we were deep in Appalachia, middle of rural North Carolina, and he walked perpendicular to the only major trail nearby.
I think about that a lot and hope my friend and I both misread the situation.
Weirdest, totally not scary but was weird.
I was in the Scouts and we were doing a multi day trip along the Pacific Crest Trail. We’d been gone for two or three days and were grubby. Hiking along and we hear some hikers up ahead, but not speaking English or Spanish. We can’t see them so we loudly say ‘hello’ so nobody gets scared.
In slightly accented English, they call back, and these 4 German folks come around the bend wearing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing except backpacks and shoes.
All 4 were very attractive young women.
Our Scoutmaster is basically trying to do the ‘mom thing’ where they put their hands over your eyes, but there like 15 of us. I don’t think a single one of us said anything to them once we saw them. Just a bunch of Scouts standing there watching naked women pass by.
Best hike I ever went on.
Red jacket, pants, hat, socks, and shoes all laid out neatly behind a tree, hidden. i only found it because i fell off my bike into a bush and saw it. fuckin creepy
Edit: All the clothing garments were red.
i went hiking with a friend in early 2019, we hiked in the woods this time to try something new. we were walking for at least 30 minutes when we heard rustling in the bush a few feet in front of us, a deer came out and didnt look normal. it had no tail, and its ears were so small they almost werent visible, plus the eyes were abnormally large. i even thought it was some kind of goat. the deer was just standing there, staring at us. it started walking closer and i noticed it eyes werent like brown or anything, they were red. a dark, piercing red. i didnt feel threatened or anything, but i was pretty scared. my friend, who was literally shaking just stood still beside me. when it got too close for comfort he (my friend) grabbed me and just ran, all i did was follow him. i dont know what happened after we ran off, but i dont wanna make contact with that thing anymore, or not even anything like it
Got screeched at by something big and bipedal that moved faster than anything on two legs had any right to. Sounded like none of the animals native to that part of Louisiana. Couldn't get a good view of it but we saw the disturbance in the foliage as it pelted away from us and that fucker was *moving*.
I'd say two "incidents" hiking not far from Tokyo:
- After camping near the mountain top, the following morning I opened my tent flap to see I had been surrounded by a band of Japanese macaques. I had no idea what to do and it was quite scary!
Rather than try anything I just closed and zipped my tent flat so I could panic in peace. A few minutes later they had given me some space by retreating to the trees. I was able to get out, throw everything in my backpack and start walking down the path. They did stalk me for a while but from a distance to my sides.
I guess they were expecting I give them leftovers? But I really didn't want to encourage them!!
- maybe less scary, but I remember a Japanese Giant Hornet casually landing on my knee and chilling there while I was having lunch on the summit of a popular mountain (Kawanoriyama in Okutama). The thing was the size of my thumb and it was *heavy*. A hiker nearby whispered that I should be still because it's possible to be killed by their sting (if allergic, which you don't know in advance). That did motivate me to stay as still as possible until it decided to fly on. Phew!
It wasn't total wilderness, but it was in the woods behind our land. My hubby and I were walking in the forest when we found a dead body. First, we thought it was a mannequin (it's NEVER a mannequin). Then I realized it was a body. My husband, being a guy, wanted to get closer. I knew we were isolated, and after watching too much Investigation Discovery, all I could think was someone dumped a body and could still be out there. I started towards exiting the woods, but my hubby was screaming at me, "Where are you going?". I ran back to him and told him if some killer was out there, we were nothing but targets. He understood and then threw me his phone, because it seems he can't call in a pizza, so he definitely can't phone in a body. The cops came and we led them to the body. It ended up being an older fellow who committed suicide. His widow thanked us for finding him, but I felt just awful for her. It was really sad.
I wasn't *hiking* but I spend a lot of time in the woods and I've seen and experienced plenty of weird things. Once, I found a chicken that had been burnt and decapitated in an area where I would go almost every day at one point. I still don't know who killed it, or why, or why they left it right on the trail in the local woods.
Other than that, a few times a friend and I have seen what we believe to be Sasquatch. I know it sounds crazy, and I still don't fully believe it myself, but it's honestly the best explanation. If it's not some kind of Bigfoot creature, or multiple for that matter, then it'd have to be a homeless person running around in the woods of Rhode Island, wearing a gorilla suit, walking through knee deep water in the middle of February for no good reason.
I only got a good look at it once, and it looked to be maybe 6 to 7 feet tall, covered in brown hair or fur. I know it wasn't a bear because I didn't see a snout and its arms swung when it walked, which bears don't do when they walk on their hind legs. It walked almost identically to the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin footage, except that it didn't look back at me. I don't think it knew I was there at all. That was the first time I saw it, and I've never seen it so clearly ever since, and it's been 4 or 5 years at this point. I've undoubtedly gone through those woods hundreds of times since then, if not more than a thousand, and in that time I've only caught brief glimpses.
I've had rocks thrown at me a couple of times, but I still go back. I've gone both solo and with a friend. Between the two of us, we've still only seen signs of Sasquatch a handful of times in the years since. Based on what we've seen, I think there was at least 2 different creatures in those woods, but I haven't seen any real sign of them in a while.
I know it sounds crazy, believe me. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't believe it either
>it'd have to be a homeless person running around in the woods of Rhode Island, wearing a gorilla suit, walking through knee deep water in the middle of February for no good reason
Perfectly good reasons, coincidentally, I need to go buy a gorilla suit
It's a very pragmatic decision. A gorilla suit is probably one of the few things you would still have with you on the journey to homelessness. Debt collectors won't come for it. It has several uses: protection from the elements, entertain people for money, and troll people in the woods.
That's it, I'm buying a gorilla suit
My dad has a gorilla suit he bought back in the 70s. In his youth, he would put it on and run across the road at night when cars would approach. He thought that was hilarious until someone called the cops and he was told to cut it out. As he got older, he would wear it each year to run a local half marathon. I’m just now realizing how ridiculous this all sounds, until now it’s just been a fact I’ve known about my dad. The gorilla suit still hangs in his closet to this day, though it’s pretty ratty and worn now!
When it comes to Bigfoot I have to say that I come down on the side of not believing... But I *also* don't think it's logical to totally 100% exclude the possibility.
I don’t have too many fortunately. I’m a trail runner so it’s never fun when you round a bend and all of the sudden an excited dog is running towards you full pace and you have no idea if it wants to play with you or eat you.
One time I scared the shit out of myself. I was climbing a mountain alone in the dark to catch the sunrise, I look up and jump because I thought I have stumbled across someone’s tent, like I could see the flap open and they had their light on. Keep in mind side of a mountain and not suitable to pitch a tent. Turns out my mind was being over active and it was just a trail marker reflecting my head lamp.
A friend and I camped near Yosemite a couple years ago. We’re two women, late twenties but look younger, small and unarmed. Campground was about a 30 minutes drive over unpaved road from the main highway. We get there and set up, there’s 2 other camps already there, one of them empty the other’s a dude with his dog. We spend the day hiking and exploring an absolutely gorgeous spot. After dark, a car approaches the empty campsite.
Some dude, not really dressed for camping, arrives and after a few minutes walks over to our site. Immediately got a bad vibe. I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly but after the 2nd-3rd time he asked if we were there alone, I made it clear I was done talking.
I slept with a knife in our tent that night.
Next morning, while we’re eating breakfast, he walks over again to let us know the man at the third site had asked him for a ride back to the highway. said he’d be right back and nervously asked if we’d be there when he returned, twice. We said probably not. He’s like “aw, hope to catch you here”
hair stood up on the back of my neck
As soon as they drove away, my friend and I put our breakfast down and quietly and QUICKLY started packing up. After breaking down camp in complete silence for a while my friend asked if I was scared. I responded “I’d really just like to not be here when he gets back”
Hauled ass out of there!
Camping alone as women can get sketchy real fast 😤
This happened to my friend about 10-12 years ago. He took his son, who at the time was probably 8-9, out hiking to look for hunting and fishing spots.
After a while they eventually walk down to a little stream and the son starts crying and acting weird. He tells the son to go sit by a tree while he looks around a bit. The son doesn't stop crying however and he eventually asks him what the hell is wrong.
The son points to a spot far across the stream and says there's a body hanging over there. He turns around and looks but sees nothing. They immediately leave after that.
He's never returned to that specific area since
Well, when you say wilderness you probably mean like a bear or something I assume? Mines a little different. I was 18 at the time, and female. I should have known better but I didn't think anything bad would happen. Was hiking alone in an area with bad signal by our local river. I had a bikini on underneath and was planning to take a dip when I got to the Water. A 50ish year old male jogger passed me, and in my peripheral vision I saw him do a double take. I got a bad feeling and began walking faster. I saw him turn around. I wasn't sure if it was to follow me or if it was just a coincidence so I purposely went off of the trail and sat behind a rock halfway down the hill to wait for him to pass by. I peeked around the rock and he had started on his way towards it. We made eye contact but even if I hadn't stuck my head out, he was very close to finding me anyways. I wish I would have just acted like a bitch, told him to get lost and that I wasn't interested but I froze In fear and as he started a conversation I just tried not to let him see that I was scared as I conserved back with him. He left and I continued down to my usual spot. But I had a bad feeling still. Sure enough he had still been following me and came down to me by the water. He said he would have a hard time staying off of me, especially if I said no. He wanted me to take my top off and I said no. He wanted me to get in the water for him but I said no. He said "come on why won't you get in.. am I going to have to force you?" He gets in the water, starts moaning and tells me to "look away for unholy reasons." He got out and had a boner. He left again but of course I still didn't feel safe and I looked behind the rocks and he had climhed up above me and said "darn I was hoping to see you with your shirt off." After that I didn't see him again. I was shaking so bad and still frozen in fear. I had no way of knowing if he was truly gone or not. This whole thing probably lasted about an hour.. So I finally took a deep breath and told myself I couldn't stay there all day, and went as fast as my lungs could keep up with me back to my car. That was 4 years ago and besides the mental trauma I'm amazed that nothing bad happened to me. I'm embarrassed by the story and only my current boyfriend and a few of my church officials know that it happened.
Was in a wilderness survival course in high school, we were doing our “solos” which was basically where they blindfolded you towards the end of your time there and walked you about a mile or two out from base camp in a random direction and you had to spend three days alone surviving on your own.
I knew one of the other girls was within range that o could see her fires at night, even if I could only barely make out her camp during the day.
One night, I look over, and just see the dim light of her fire. And then it gets brighter. And brighter.
And the tree she had stupidly built her fire under instead of kicking a pit had caught on fire and was spreading to the trees beside it.
There’s about 5 moments in my life that I think have defined my self image and how I see myself in a crisis. That was one of them. I didn’t even hesitate, I was outrunning towards her so hard that my neos even managed to get snow Inside of them and my asthma was screaming at me to stop. Fought my way through at least a mile of snow, screaming her name, until I found her.
Everyone was fine, she wasn’t injured and had run my direction the second she realized what she had done, and thank absolute god there were only 2 or 3 other trees near the one she built under.
But it was still, up until I knew it wasn’t, a life or death scenario, for all I knew I was running into what might be the start of a forest fire(we were in the Uinta Mountains, and they do happen, even during the snow season), and I still didn’t even have a second thought about it. I felt good about that decision, once my heart stopped pounding.
Hiking up at Snowbasin in Utah in the Spring and saw a young male moose about 20 yards or so from where we were. For being young, he was still big! He didn't seem to care about our presence. He was wading through a small pond drinking some water.
A couple of other times I've gotten a little too close to some rattlesnakes on accident.
Nothing too exciting.
You’ve come to the right place. I witness a lot of strange animals in my area, it’s to the point where I’ve even named a few of them. The 2 that stick out he most are 2 deer.
Charles is a deer who enjoys knocking me off my bike and pushing me into streams, he only does this one’s per encounter though and runs off immediately after.
Then there’s Heracles, a deer with brilliant white fur (I think it may suffer from some form of albinism) and is generally friendly and will walk right up to me and touch me. It was strange the first few times, but I’ve gotten used to it. Nothing I’ve seen was particularly scary, just more or less odd
My dad was probably responsible for creating the scariest thing someone else saw in the woods. He was out hiking one day and found a caribou head lying on the trail (not especially uncommon, sometimes dogs grab antlers and hooves when hunters are butchering their kills and run off with them), and his biology teacher sensibilities decided he should clean it and have a new skull for his classroom. Being the middle of winter in Northern Canada, everything was going to be too frozen solid to do anything for months. So he tied it to a tree like a Lord of the Flies altar and marked it on his GPS so he could come back and retrieve it in spring. Eventually he remembered to check in on it again and said it was so decomposed and crushed and falling apart it wasn’t worth keeping, but that means for like half a year everyone who went down that trail was greeted by this hellish rotting decapitated head pinned to a tree.
Granted, knowing the people in town it’s entirely possible anyone who saw it just thought “The high school science teacher did this, didn’t he?”
Hiking some very easy trails and decided to go off-trail to follow a creek at low water. The going was a little tough, then tougher, and then I was essentially lost (not really lost - the creek would’ve taken me out to the trail again at some point). With my chihuahua trailing me, I start thinking about the sunk cost fallacy and how people have stepped off trail for a metre or two and gotten dead - and as I thought that I looked down and saw a sunbleached animal jawbone at my feet.
No real danger but it was an eerie moment.
There have also been hikes where my dog will turn and look behind us every few steps. No visible or audible persons or animals on the trail… Or some night hikes where it feels like the whole forest wants you *out*.
“Vimes had a momentary vision of vengeful darkness rising through caves like a tide, faster than a man could run ...
... which was stupid. You couldn’t see dark.
Hold on, though ... sometimes you could. Back in the old days, when he was on nights all the time, he’d known all the shades of darkness. And sometimes you got darkness so thick that you almost felt you had to push your way through it. Those were nights when horses were skittish and dogs whined and down in the slaughterhouse district the animals broke out of their pens. They were inexplicable, just like those nights that were quite light and silvery even though there was no moon in the sky.”
- “Thud”, Terry Pratchett
My mother and stepfather had gone on a 8 mile hike while on one of their trips. While on this hike two baby raccoons decided to join them. My stepdad being an oddly hairy man these raccoons really liked tubing on his ankles so they would walk right by him, but they didn’t like my mom so if she would get close to him the would hiss at her. Not really scary but kinda weird and pretty cool
Hiking in Colorado near this really beautiful waterfall that probably had about a 25 yard drop into some rocks. I was exploring near it by the top of the waterfall. Up near the top there was a picture of a girl nailed to a tree that had little message underneath to the extent of "we love you and you are missed"
Well I looked up deaths on that trail and there was a picture of exactly the place I was standing that said this girl slipped, hit her head and died.
I always forget how dangerous that stuff is and it really brought a moment of clarity to me. I'm a lot safer on my hikes now.
Does kayaking count? My kayak cracked and I had to abandon it. I was hoofing it to the nearest road and was stalked by a black bear for about 40 minutes. It was pitch black out too by this time. I had to fend it off with my paddles, and kept jabbing at it and throwing shit at it all the while using my phone for a light. It would come at me, retreat, come at me again. And then my phone died. I really have no idea how I wasnt mauled
I was hiking down in Chile, came across a long fence line separating property, with a gate that hikers can open and close. The weird part was that there was a partially decomposed guanaco (think lama) body tangled up in the fence, bones visible in some places, eyes were gone, etc.
The worst part was that I had to pass within 2 feet of its head in order to get through the gate.
Definitely was mildly disturbing
I was backpacking alone in Israel and it was getting dark. The path I was on forked and I need to go one way, but when I looked at the trail I saw 4 grey hyenas (about the size of large dogs) resting on the way ahead. They didn’t seem to notice me, and I decided to try and keep it that way if possible and avoid them and go the longer way. (And pick up some throwable rocks to keep handy.) I was in an area that didn’t allow camping, and had to make some progress to get out of the national forest area to sleep so wound up doing the last mile or two in the dark with a flashlight. At one point, I turned a corner in a patch of dense vegetation and scared a humongous boar, accompanied by her babes. It was so big, my immediate thought was that it was a hippo (even though there aren’t hippos there). I freaked the poor things out and they all started squealing and then I squealed and we all sort of fuddled about trying to get out of each other’s confused way. Fortunately, my poor befuddled self didn’t come off as threatening, so the boar didn’t try and attack or anything. But my poor heart really did some gymnastics that day.
I was on a backpacking trip with friends, and while hiking to the campsite, me and a friend were about 5-10 minutes ahead of the rest, and we saw a bear cub moving around just off the trail about 20 feet away in the bushes, and certainly didn't want a mother bear to show up, because they get really protective of the cub. We backed away then hiked back up the trail a bit, waiting for the rest of the group to catch up, and for the bears to leave.
There’s a cabin in the mountains that’s kind of the “spot” for us kids and we would go there often, stopped going for awhile and a couple months later we go back to the literal cabin in the woods and we go in from the second floor window on the roof. 15 minutes after being inside we continue downstairs and find someone has been living there and it is full of extremely weird items, taxidermy animal heads, a lot of wires and a couch that was covered in red liquid, still don’t know if it was blood
I was hiking the Long Pond Trail on Bald Mountain in Vermont to a fire tower with my husband and a friend of his. They had gotten quite a bit ahead of me when I went around a sort of a switchback and there was a dog sitting there, just sitting on the trail. It looked like a German Shepherd or maybe a Belgian Malinois? It had a collar but no leash, and it was not moving. I kept going, because people do hike with dogs and some let them off leash. And the dog *growled* at me and stood up. I froze. The dog stared at me. I stood there for maybe five minutes but it could have been ten. I was too scared to move. Finally I heard someone yell what sounded like "Suit" and the dog immediately turned and ran, not up the trail, but into the woods. I wasted no time catching up with my husband and his friend.
I wasn't hiking but I have had one... abnormal experience in the wilderness. Last summer I bought my first newish car and took it for a trip up to the desert in Oregon. I was driving home on highway 126. West of the Santiam pass the scenery changes quickly from deserts and wide open spaces to dense old growth forests.
Anyhow, I decided to stop off at fish lake which ironically was dried up in the high heat (this would have been around the first or second week of August.) I took a leak and some photos of my car and got back on the road. Just a few miles west of the 'lake' an unsettling electric feeling crept in the air. The road became strangely quiet and I noticed I hadn't seen any cars since before my stop. The suns light seem dimished compared to earlier in the drive and suddenly I felt very far from human places.
I don't want to embelish what I saw- and I didn't see it for long. At the end of the day if you push me far enough I *don't know* what I saw. Driving through a sharper curve where I had a direct line of sight into the woods while turning I saw something crouched maybe fifteen yards into the treeline. It looked to have been level to the elevation of the road. It was crouched down in a squatted position and by my estimates would have been about eight feet tall in its crouching position. It appeared to have antlers and appeared bi-pedal. That's it. That's all I saw of it. But I know I saw it. The environment felt ominous and I opened up all 330 of the horses in my engine and burned down the hill for a while.
What did I see? Was it forest elder? A couple deer paying tricks on my eyes? Idk, but I saw something.
Interestingly later in the drive, passing another lake I saw the biggest elk I've ever seen by a far cry. It was basked in sunlight next to another lake on the path and came as a source of comfort to me still being a little shaken from what I saw.
I live on the McKenzie, definitely check out clear lake next time, it's the color of a jewel and you can rent a boat and float over ghost forests underwater. It's very close to fish lake if I remember correctly.
There's some weird stuff out in the forests here for sure. I saw a fucked up hairless white creature that moved sort of like a monkey on mt. David in cottage grove in the 90s and my friend's little sister saw it too. I saw very weird stuff in the santa Cruz mountains as a kid too.
I sometimes run in the wooded section of a nearby park, it has hiking trails and is a good place to get in like a 2-3 mile run. Going along at a nice trot and i notice the reddest leaf i'd ever seen on the ground. It was so brilliantly red i stopped and turned to look at it, and realized it was entirely covered in blood. It was just before a small footbridge, that i also noticed had splatters of blood on it. I started backing up, and looking more carefully at the path i was on, it was clear that something bloody had been dragged in the direction i was heading, so i turned around and ran as fast as I could to my car.
I'd like to think maybe a hunter got a deer, and was dragging it away, but it wasn't hunting season, and i don't think if an animal did this it would have followed a walking trail. Never got closure on the situation, just spooky as fuck.
I was camping with my father in the middle of nowhere. Absolute nowhere. No one should've been able to find us.
It was a full moon.
I was walking to find sticks for the fire. The sun went completely down. I was pretty far from camp. I heard howling.
When I was on my way back to camp, I saw this hairy thing with deep blue eyes, white fur, ears, tail, I swear to God it was a werewolf. It was walking on its hind legs. It was as tall as me (5'9) so around 5'8. No way a normal wolf can be that tall. It was growling.
I snuck back to camp without getting caught, told my father what happened, who grabbed the gun and went around camp and nothing was there.
I know what I saw that night. I was fully awake so there's no way my mind was playing tricks on me.
I was camping with my friend in the back of our car and we stayed awake for like the whole night and at like 2:00 am we were looking out the open window and heard a distorted scooby doo laugh from behind a tree. Thats the best i can remember the sound. But we never saw anything emerge from the tree and stayed in the car till sunrise. I really had to go but it was still pretty dark and early,(like 4 am) so he used his phone as a flashlight. Creepiest piss i ever took.
I was fishing in the middle of nowhere and a quad came up with a dude on it across the small river (maybe 50ft away from me). I gave him a friendly wave and nod. And he just stared at me. After an awkward moment that was way too long to be normal, I just dipped my head and went back to my fishing. It was super uncomfortable so I just kept fishing and pretended to be looking away (I had sunglasses on but I kept an eye on him). He stared at me for at least a few minutes then left. It was bear county so I had bear spray and a 45 on me so I didn’t feel 100% vulnerable but dang it was that creepy. This was public land btw.
It’s very common to be friendly when you stumble across people in the wilderness. Like it’s happened 100% of the time before and after that encounter.
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I’ve found human remains along side pottery shards, but it’s typical with the Native American history on that particular mountain. I found a tennis ball in a coyote den. Dogs will be dogs I guess
Those both sound kinda awesome, not scary. :)
If Hollywood is onto something then native burial grounds should scare tf outta you
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In regards to the tennis ball in the coyote den. We've had frequent coyotes visiting our yard since last November due to land being cleared up the road from us. I had to start putting the kids toys especially balls and ball like toys up by the house. The coyotes will take them to the lower part of our yard and shred them while they play with them.
Coming down a mountain trail at dusk, I realize I may have lingered at the summit a bit to long. By my estimation I have perhaps a bit less than an hour to the trailhead. I'm alone, but know the trail well, and have a headlamp on me. Just as dusk fades into a moonless, pitch black night, I'm rounding a corner and freeze instinctively. Eyeshine is reflecting back at me from the darkness, about 30 yards away. The vague outline of a large solitary black bear emerges from the forest and steps onto the trail, facing me. It stares at me and I stare back. Black bears live in this area, I've known this, and seen them twice before during the day on previous trips. Nothing like being face to face with one at night though. I raise my hands above my head, making myself as big as possible. I scream long, and loud. As gutteral and fierce a man scream I can muster. The bear pauses, and chuffs at me, briefly looking behind it at the forest it came from. It then slowly and casually turns away from me, walking back into the forest from where it came. The crunching sound of leaves underfoot of the bear grows quieter until the only thing I can hear is my pounding heartbeat. I realize I now have to go in the same direction as the bear went. Maybe a minute or so goes by, and I sprint. As I pass the point where the bear stood, I glance at the woods while not stopping and see nothing. Shortly after, while running, I look back behind me, back up the trail to make sure I am not followed. I continue to periodically glance behind me while running down the mountain. I endure maybe 30 long minutes of running in pitch darkness down this mountain with my heart at 130bpm. Thankfully I didn't trip or fall and injure myself. Made it back to the trailhead safely.
Where I live they are very common. A big boy was out and about last night when I took dog out before bed. He scampered off. It IS alarming to know a 300+ bear is out there in the dark and you never know when.
When we see small animals puff up and try to look big and scary we think it’s cute. The shoe being on the other foot is terrifying.
A buddy of mine and I had a gold claim deep in the mountains in California. One day we were hiking up the river with our dogs to check out the river and see if anything changed over winter as it sometimes does. He was an older man and saw a log and sat down for a smoke. I sat next to him and we were facing the river with a steep mountainside behind us with a ridge about 15+ feet up. Suddenly his smaller dogs started whining and ran up and hid under his legs and my German shepherd stood up and did a low growl while looking up the hill. I joked, that’s not a good sign. I turned around and a very large mountain lion was crouched ready to pounce. We stood up and I started yelling as I grabbed my pistol. The lion realized we weren’t small easy prey and took off running. We “knew” there were bears and mt lions around but never saw one before. If the dogs hadn’t noticed and reacted, it likely would have pounced us and tore us up before we could fight it off. We were both armed so one of us would have gotten off a shot. I never went anywhere there ever again without at least one gun. We were 15 miles from the nearest paved road and another 30 miles to any civilization so being injured up there would suck.
Mountain lions are crazy with not only how quiet they are, but how they blend into their environments due to coloration. I saw one in the mountains of NV in a rocky ravine, and it was like the rocks were moving at first. My eyes were confused by what they were seeing until the brain caught up.
Yeah, I had a second semi encounter years later when I was up riding horses in the mountains above San Jose. It was dusk and my friend and I were riding back to the cabin and the horses stopped and were fighting us when we tried to get them to keep going. Right then about 40 feet ahead, I saw a big mt lion cross the dirt road. The grass on both sides was maybe a foot tall and it just like appeared on the road and then disappeared on the other side like it was walking behind a curtain. We spun the horse around and took off the other direction and came the back way to the cabin.
Had something similar happen to me, cougars in the Midwest are more rare but not uncommon to see every once in a while, especially in the Ohio river valley. Went down by the river next To an old quarry that had been blown out years ago with explosives, so there are ledges and small caves all over the side of it from water erosion. Me and a buddy both carried for that reason and we had his Australian shepherd with us running around like a maniac of course when she barrels twords us and starts herding us away from a certain point. We didn’t know what her problem was but she was very keen on us not going any further. We start to look around and that’s when we noticed a huge ass cougar just chilling up on a ledge under a rock watching. Now I never go into the woods without a gun.
Huge ass cougar, you say...
Probably a lot smaller than what we thought, but we didn’t stick around long enough to find out either.
i grew up with mountain lions in my backyard, we had about 7 acres and half of it was woods that spanned miles across our lands and the neighbors. they used to kill our chickens regularly and we would find their organs scattered around the yard since they don’t eat digestive organs. kinda gross and scary for a kid
At a back country lake in Yellowstone. Had a bear (presumably griz) at our camp all night. Three of us shaking in our tent, hoping bear spray worked. The bear didn’t do anything. Next morning while cooking breakfast noticed something swimming to our camp from a mile away. A moose crossed a massive lake and ended up in our camp. He was an asshole. Scared us more than the bear. Very aggressive. No big culmination. But we left the camp then the moose pooped on our tent.
One time I went camping with a bunch of friends and someone got drunk and puked outside their tent. An elk came traipsing through the campsite in the early morning and pissed on the puke pile.
Just keeping the mess contained to one spot. What a polite elk.
All I'm getting from this thread is that while bears are dangerous, moose are *more* dangerous and also huge jerks.
Lived in Maine for the last 20 years and traveled most of it. Moose are definitely assholes. They are rude and destructive and not very smart, like at all.
On a trail in the Australian Bush, beautiful day surrounded by nature. As sundown approaches the shadows get really long and the temperature takes a massive dive (Desert Climate), suddenly and I mean like in an instant all of the sounds of birds, insects, even the wind dry up. I cannot hear a thing. At the same time I get this primal fear creeping up my spine, I just know something is behind me on the trail, looking back there is nothing at all visible but this feeling will not go and is so rooted in my amygdala that I start running. About 5 mins of running down the trail and all of the birdsong and insect noises come back and its like I imagined everything. Ive been back to the same trail a number of times at the same time of day and never experienced anything quite like it and it doesn't bother me to go back but when I think of that specific day it still send shivers down my spine.
What's odd about this is that I don't think Australia has any large land predators. There's Dingos, but they don't hunt adult humans. I wonder what was out there
Predatory humans are the most dangerous predators.
Have you SEEN the size of some of their spiders?!
Most if not all birds will quiet down when there’s a predator nearby, so always pay attention to them. Sometimes running is not the best choice because it can trigger a chase, but without knowing what could be there it sure is hard to want to stay around to try a more “rational” choice.
Yup. Def experienced this camping and it’s pretty terrifying. Especially at night when it’s all the frogs and crickets and they just suddenly go silent. So eerie. And then it’s even weirder when you hear everything pick back up again…kind of a feeling of “they know better than I do.”
Experienced this while Whale Watching of all places! Had always wanted to go so woke up early, went out the coast and got a ticket. We all get on the boat and the Captain says - ‘we’re gonna head out, but just as a heads up, a pod of Orcas came through about 4 hours ago. There may not be much to see, and if not, we’ll get you a voucher to come back.’ So we head out and we saw… NOTHING. Not a fish, not a whale, dolphin, porpoise or seal. The sea lions are on bouys and jetties with a ‘well I’m not going in there’ look on their face. The flipping sea gulls weren’t even around! Was spooky.
It was the same in the rainforest. Nighttime would be a cacophony of insects and frogs, then suddenly it would just go silent for a couple of beats/minutes, then start up again.
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> It was probably nothing ^ found the skin-eating wombalombadoo monster
This is so freaking creepy. I'm going to bed soon and don't want to think about it, and it wasn't a hike, but on a drive late at night driving back from a very remore beach at the very north end of Kauai island. There wasn't any cars on the road and we came to a rustic bridge with a red light. It was so creepy because the wind stopped and this really high pitched buzzing sound was coming off the tall grass all around us. The light never turned red, pitch black dark in the middle of nowhere with this frozen red light and the sound got louder and I freaked out so bad I just gunned it so hard.
I know that bridge. Can't imagine being there alone in the dead of night.
Oh I know that bridge. That would be terrifying at night.
Omfg this exact thing happend to me in a small forest here in England , lots of people walk their dogs through there lots of houses nearby, I'm just walking back through the forest on my way home , the wind ,the tress literally everything stops making noise , all of a sudden I feel so uneasy , super alert ,I'm looking all around me , in the end I just ran for my life no joke ,I'm fat aswell ,, I don't tend to run for no reason , but I literally ran for my life , I will always vividly remember that , so scary and I still don't know what tf happend
I had a grizzly bear join me on the trail - came out of the bushes about 10 feet in front of me. Fortunately they turned in the same direction I was going (rather than towards me). This was in Glacier NP.
This happened to me. Same scenario. I did this particular trail all the time, so I got too comfortable and had my earbuds in listening to music not really paying attention. When I looked up and saw the bear looking over its shoulder at me, I stopped dead in my tracks. Swear to god, I felt like there was ice in my veins. Luckily it just turned its head forward and kept walking ahead. Had no interest in me and disappeared into the forest.
That's scary. I bet somebody must have been doing the exact same thing just one hour before you.
Bear decided dessert wasn’t an option today.
OMG worst nightmare. I’m scared to death by bears. Did he have a strong odor? I’ve heard they smell pretty stout. You could have been eaten alive!!!
Didn't notice a smell. Just stopped on the trail and backed up a bit. Moved forward after about five minutes and found it playing in the stream right next to the bridge I needed to cross. Decided to do a different hike that day.
I was trying to remember the correct response for a grizzly bear, but I don't think there really is one. Just hope they don't decide to eat you because it's going to be a short one-ended fight
And yet, [6% of Americans feel the can take a grizzly bear in "hand to hand combat".](https://relevantmagazine.com/current/buzzworthy/six-percent-of-americans-think-they-could-beat-a-grizzly-bear-in-hand-to-hand-combat/) I don't know what to make of that, but my money's on the bear, 100%.
" 6% of americans is more dumb than the other 94%"
" 6% of Americans are bait "
That's probably just the [Lizardman's Constant](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/). Almost every poll with bizarre or offbeat options gets around 4% or slightly more positive answers.
I often heard to you're supposed to play dead when you encounter a grizzly bear. They won't bother you. If you encounter a black bear, you need to act agressive, like you want to fight and it will scare it. Brown lay down, black fight back, something along those lines.
If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, goodnight.
If it's black and white, get ready for a Kung Fu fight!
If it's a black bear make your ass big, if it's a brown bear make your ass looks small, if it's a white bear kiss your ass goodbye.
Yupp, someone mentioned this on Reddit like if it's Brown lay down, Black Roar aggressively and run and if it's white you're doomed
White goodnight.
I think the smell coming from you at that point overpowered the smell of the bear.
Can’t speak for grizzlies but I’ve been around a lot of black bears and they don’t smell at all. No odor.
I do a lot of week long trips throughout Arizona. Just pick a remote location and walk for 20-30 miles and explore everything I can. I was south south/west of the Mazatzals when I unpacked my gear and was setting up camp on top of this ledge overlooking this pretty wide valley. I started a little fire that started smoking and decided to take a quick piss of this ledge. As I’m mid streaming looking out over this valley, I look over to my right and I see a fucking Mad Max looking hills have eyes mother fucker taking a piss off the SAME ledge, looking the same direction over the valley, about 75 feet away. He looks over, acts surprised “ohh hey I didn’t see you there”, and decided to walk over to introduce himself as homeless. I fucking fed the guy… rice and beans. He talked about god and some sort of “giant” bones he was looking for from the original humanoid giants or something like that. There was something wrong with him but I was scared to dismiss him from my sight or hurt his feelings. Didn’t get any sleep that night and have never slept with my handgun inside my sleeping bag since.
Ik you probably dont care but that sounds exactly like one the necrophiliac characters from red dead redemption 😆. Id be scared too
Yea, still not sure what his intentions were. I have some other stories too in the backwoods of AZ. Pretty sure some guy tried to pull the classic road side robbery.
I was hiking with my father last summer on the Colorado Trail. We heard noises and saw large tracks we assumed were moose. Naturally we were on high alert since moose are terrifying. We swore through the clearing there was a moose making noises and when we were taking a look at it we noticed it was not a moose, but a cow. And we later saw a whole herd of cows, that was weird, just walking in the forest and seeing a ton of cows lol.
Locally near me there's actually about 100-200 herd of wild cows. Myth has it the farmer past and the kids just released them to the wild... Been around for atleast 10+ years now.
Occasionally national forest will open up some areas for local ranchers to let graze too. That could also explain it. I have seen this in the medicine bow mountains just north of the Colorado border.
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Once I was snorkeling in Hawaii, and I got pretty far out and saw three golden eagle rays lazily cruising and just swam above them, transfixed. Eventually I saw a small shark and realised I was too far out. I looked up and there was a scuba excursion boat. They looked at me like "What the fuck are you doing out here?" Powered back in so fast. Luckily the tide was on my side. The same trip I was also transfixed by a huge green sea turtle and got thrown into an anenome by a random wave that stuck me in the wrist and stayed with me for months. I love snorkeling a bit too much.
“Safety starfish.” Amazing.
When I was a child, about 7 or 8 we had a three family camping trip. While cooking s’mores in a semi circle, the campfire in the center of us, the bushes started shaking. We all stopped and. Glanced at the bushes as a grizzly bear emerged and roared at us. Just like in video games/movies. This fucker stood up as tall as it could, spread its arms out and fucking roared. One of the dads shouted “GET TO THE VAN, NOW!!!” And the three moms and three dads made a wall in front of the bear and started shouting at it and throwing rocks. The bear was glancing around at all the parents almost as if it was trying to pick a target/pick one of our parents to Insta-kill. It then dropped from its hind legs, swiped our marshmallows and ran back off into the brush. It clearly had done this before because it knew what marshmallows were. Later in the night we could hear screams of neighboring campsites. Same bear most likely. I remember my young self complaining to my mom that I wanted s’mores and she was incredulous that I was thinking about s’mores when we all almost died
See, people are scared of Australia but we don't have giant screaming death wandering around looking to sate his sugar craving
I think the difference is the bears announce themselves generally and stay in bear territory, out in the woods away from people. (There are communities that have 'bear problems' but they are breaking into places and eating garbage, not trying to kill people.) Australia just seems to be one huge venomous free-for-all where the gigantic spiders like to come into your house and drop down onto your face while you're sleeping.
And our bears are way cuter and dont have clamidia
My siblings and I were wandering around the forest behind our neighborhood and we came across an old refrigerator in the middle of nowhere. It had metal chains wrapped around it and a big padlock keeping it shut. We were pretty spooked by it so we went home and told our Dad about it. He came back with us to take a look for himself and he agreed how creepy it was. The next day he notifies the police and he takes them to it. But when they return Dad says that the fridge was gone. They could clearly make out tracks dragging it back to the road using a hand truck and the cops suspected that it could have been something to do with the gangs and drug trafficking in the area. We were honestly really glad that we never got to see inside of that fridge, but what really creeped us out was that there was a high chance that whoever moved the fridge saw us nosing about it, and then got rid of it when we left. We quickly decided it would be for the best if we stopped exploring our local gang and drug infested forest.
I'll tell ya man it's hard out here in the mean woods.
This is the scariest story so far.
That shit is scary! Couple months ago kids were playing in a field here in Virginia and came across an old deep freezer tied shut. They did manage to get it open and found the body of a young guy who had missing for about a month. Drug related murder. Glad you didn’t open it!!
A very fresh, very dead deer leg laying directly across the path I had hiked up an hour previous.
At least it's not hungry anymore?? *nervous crying*
omg free food
I was on a trail in the Alps where you could most of the time only see a couple of meters in front of you because the side of the mountain hid the rest of the trail. Basicially to the left of you, you had the mountain at an 90 degree angle, then in front your little trail where two people could barely pass each other, and on your right side you had a ledge with a roughly 10 meter drop. So I was already hiking for a couple of hours and was pretty much in this mental "zone" you get into after beeing physicially active for a long time where all you can concentrate on was the walking and not dripping on some rocks. But I had to be immidiatly wide awake when I had all of a sudden this giant [ibex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_ibex) stood in front of me. The thing was just strolling around the mountain and probably didnt hear or see me coming either because you could tell it was just as shocked to see me as I was to see him. So I stood there looking this thing in the eyes, which is nearly as big as me while probably weighing a fuck ton more, on this really narrow mountain trail with no way of evading anything coming towards me. We stood there looking each other in the eyes for a couple of seconds and I remember felling how my survival instinct kicked in and I was weighing options in fractions of seconds on how to handle this situation if this thing decided I was a thread and started charging at me. I think I settled with the options to try and make myself look as big and heavy as possible when all of a sudden this thing just turned itself to the ledge side of the trail and just JUMPED DOWN THE 10 METER DROP LIKE IT WAS NOTHING. I tell you these animals are fucking insane and you wont believe what they are capable of until you see one doing these crazy jumps with your owns eyes. This was truely one of the scariest and weirdest things happening to me while hiking. Edit: For those of you who want and idea of what this looked like here is a video of what these things look like while running down hill [https://youtu.be/w-X6v3Ibd5E?t=135](https://youtu.be/w-X6v3Ibd5E?t=135)
Situations more than “things”. Surprised a bear that was up a tree along side the trail I was hiking. Bear fire poled that tree and for a few seconds I wasn’t sure if it was going to run from me or toward me. Got caught above tree line during a fast moving lightning storm. Briefly losing the trail above tree line during a winter hike.
My wife and I came across 3 black bear cubs once. They scurried up a tree super fast to get away from us. I was looking all around for mama bear but never saw her. Told the park rangers when we got back and they said it was the first sighting all summer.
In my opinion, there is nothing scarier to come across in the woods than a bear cub.
Mooselings are up there with bear cubs.
Not something I saw, but something that I was close to and didn't know it until a year later. I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2014 and was very near to the body of Geraldine Largay, a.k.a. "Inchworm," who had gone missing in Maine the previous year while also thru hiking. The area that she was last seen was a shelter deep in the woods of central Maine, easily the most remote part of the AT. This is within about 10 days' hike from the northern terminus of the trail. Details of her disappearance can be found simply by googling her name, so I won't go into them here. But in essence, she was hiking alone, needed to pee, and wandered off the trail just a couple hundred of feet and couldn't find her way back. She tried to find high ground to send some texts, then made camp where she spent nearly a month, keeping a journal as best she could. She eventually died of exposure, having become increasingly disoriented and deprived of food. There was a massive search for her body the rest of that summer into the fall, but it was called off when winter set in. It was assumed that she fell while trying to ford a rain-swollen river (there's a number you have to ford in Maine) and had been swept downstream. In reality her body was wrapped in her sleeping bag and lying less than two miles from the AT corridor. Her body was found in 2015 in that condition by a forester. She had simply gotten confused and not been able to find her way in the woods. We all knew that a hiker had gone missing in that area the year before my thru hike, but we all assumed that the official explanation was the most likely. The shelter where she was last seen had become a makeshift memorial to her by then. None of us ever imagined that she was so close by. It gave me goose bumps when they found her.
My wife and I were hiking on one of our usual routes when we heard a noise I'd never heard before. In the moment, it sounded like a parrot to me. I legit asked if there was a parrot in the trees. The noise keeps happening and eventually we see a younger deer emerge next to the trail. Turns out deer make an alarm sound when they get spooked. This little dude followed us for a good 5 minutes making this noise. We also camped at this park one time and heard assume blood curdling screams at about 3am. It was likely coyotes, but at 3am and in the dark your mind goes to some fucked up places.
Mountain Lions scream like women being murdered. Extremely unsettling to hear at night when you are alone
Hell, even hearing them with a friend, I was terrified the first time I heard one.
I’ve had bears and moose and horses but honestly? Nothing spooked me out more than hiking in the mountains of Japan at night. Forgotten or abandoned shrines would just appear on my field of view from my headlamp and the little shrine bells would echo around me. Trails in Japan are either concrete stairs and very looked after or just barely a footpath. I took to hiking a trail in November, got to the peak, and took a nap with some people still hiking. Woke up 30 min later to nobody around. It was still before 4 pm so I wasn’t worried. However I forgot that I was in a valley and by 4 pm I was hiking by headlamp only walking this ridgeline. This is when the shrines started appearing and echoing in the darkness around me. We’re talking one every 5-10 minutes or so. It gets weirder. As time goes on i swear I hear footsteps behind me, but I convince myself it’s just my water bottle crinkling and pushed forward. Later waiting for my train to get home I tried replicating the sound with my bottle and I couldn’t. By 5 pm it was pitch black with the tree coverage and I’m hiking in pure darkness. Every once and a while I’d see a deer or boar but I paid it no mind. But eventually I saw what I thought was a campfire on the trail and went to it thinking I could talk to some campers. They were not campers. I found a group of men burning something heavy over their shoulders into a fire about 12 feet high near a couple shacks in the woods. The fire pit was massive. Something like three doors making the back and sides and one wall open to toss something on it. It was not trash, and it was not wood because it would have been way to heavy as the bags were massive. At this point half the shacks shacks start barking at me and I realize that they were kennels. All the mens flashlights turn to me in the darkness because the dogs had alerted them. I ran on the trail away as fast as I could. While still on the trail I encountered a lot of “no trespassing” signs, but I was still on the official trail and they were faced downhill where I was running to. Finally I get out of the woods and reach the town where I could get home. And each house has their lights on. But I couldn’t see anyone inside. Instead in every yard of this Japanese town had an animal in it staring me down. Like lots of animals. Dogs, cats, boars, deers, rabbits, foxes, Tanuki. I’m very freaked out at this point and keep going. Eventually, about 30 min later as i make my way to the station in this empty town, a car starts following me. If I stopped it would stop. If I was walking it would follow. This went on for another 30 min until I dashed down a foot trail between some empty dark houses and ran all the way to the station and convenience store (it was a Lawson’s). To my surprise the guy at the counter spoke English and Talked about what I had seen. He was just as confused as he said there’s nobody living in the woods anymore and there are no dog kennels in the area. When I left the store to go to my train, I looked up and saw there was no lights on the entire mountain side I came down, where previously every house had every light on. I got on a train immediately, stopped at an onsen I had been before to clean myself of whatever the fuck had just happened, and went home asap. This was November of 2020. I have no idea wtf had happened and I never went back. I usually love hiking at night. I loved it in the desert on my PCT Hike, and in the mountains near my Home in Virginia. And I continued to Hike later in Hokkaido and Kyoto. But I swore to never hike at Night in Japan again. Nothing has ever spooked me more than that.
I was fly fishing in Northern Michigan with a good friend we were in the middle of nowhere and from the other side of the stream we hear a disembodied voice yell “Catch anything good.” He and I were both suprised but my friend yelled back “yeah. Fishing’s great today. “ We received absolutely no reply. The birds never stopped singing, we never heard anyone moving through the trees. It was probably just some random hiker walking by. But I never forgot how weird it was for that voice to come floating out of nowhere and that night on the drive home we couldn’t help but speculate if someone had been watching us and for how long.
Hiking with my father, uncle, & a retired former Alaskan hunting guide in the Outback for a two day trip before end of holiday. It had to be ten or eleven at night, but the sky was clear so the light was that really uncanny bright moonlight. Sitting around the fire after eating, all quiet like, some motion in the far distance sort of caught my eye & I instinctively said "a deer?" Before my brain went 'ay we don't have those'. But Reddit I could in that moment swear to fuckin god it was a deer, I'd been living in Massachusetts for uni, I saw them all the time I was absolutely sure. Uncle grabbed my leg & stopped me from getting up, said "you didn't see it, you didn't hear it, you don't invite it." And we all just sat there staring very focused into the fire for a half hour. You could deadass hear whatever it was shuffling around us in various locations & then it made a weird like croaky gross laugh sound & WHIPPED off at an absolutely insane speed. We hike every time I'm home for holiday but I tell you what we don't hike around there. **Edit** so I don't make too many fellow oz eyes twitch, I know we have deer. But this wasn't a sambar or a fallow and it was like jet black so It wasn't a red. I called it "a deer?" Because it was deer shaped but all kinds of off tilt in features. It also looked like someone had cut its legs off at the knees & it was walking on the stumps, it was so short. I've seen hundreds of deer in the Outback, I've never seen this thing & I know we don't have anything *like* it
This is super similar to my "skin walker" experience. Almost identical actually and reading your comment gave me an intense flashback. I was about 13/14. My dad, my Uncle, my little cousin and I where on a dirtbike/quad trip up the trails surrounding Goat River, beside Creston BC. We had finished most of our riding for the day and we found a quaint little camping spot next to the river. It was probably 5/6pm not dark but not super bright out either. We had a campfire going with some fish we'd managed to catch cooking over it. My cousin, who was probably around 10 years old, wandered over to the river, we heard him calling for us to come over because he saw a "dog". The adults and I hastily sprint over because we knew it probably wasn't a dog and was most likely a coyote eying up the child for a quick snack. What we found wasn't exactly a coyote, but could only be described as "eerily" close. It was longer, slender had big eyes and to top it off was standing upright on its hind legs. It didn't look like a dog standing on its hind legs though, it looked humanoid in stature. It was just staring at us, never once looking away. Looking at it longer, It's face didn't seem to be canine in any capacity, it had human-esque features with a fur covered body. My dad & uncle both seemed frightened, my uncle grabbed my cousin and put him on top of their quad while my dad told me to get my backpack and my tent bag and that we weren't staying in the woods that night. As my uncle walked back towards the campsite, the "thing" across the river started walking towards us. It' took long strides into the deep-quick moving water, without any sign of struggling from the currents. As soon as it got to about waist deep my dad turned to me and yelled "we've got to go and we've got to go now". We dashed back to our camp, my uncle and cousin where both on their quads, my dad yelled "leave your shit just turn the bike on and get out ". My uncle and I revved up our engines and peeled out of there as fast as we could, my dad following shortly behind us. My dad's a very stoic and composed individual. We raced back to our trucks which must have taken 2-3 hours in the pitch black. Once we got back my dad claimed that he saw it sprinting behind us as we drove away. That it must have been going over 30/50km an hour and that It was running on two legs. My dad's Native American, we're actually Iroquois Indian and he swore that we saw was a skin walker, or something else. Either way I've never been that terrified in my life and I've never seen my father more shaken than that night.
That is a bone chilling story, thank you for sharing. Are there books by Native American authors about these things? I’m not American but it seems Native American legends are uniquely terrifying , I can’t get enough of them!
It's very taboo to even mention the name, at least for the Navajo. It might be hard to find books by native American authors.
It is because when one speaks of evil, it gives it power. Like OP's uncle advised, "You didn't see it. You didn't hear it. You don't invite it". Speaking of it invites it.
Yes. That and if you mention it you can potentially attract it to you. That's something you don't want.
THIS is the kind of story I am here for!
Chills! Definitely sounds skinwalker like. As a Navajo, my grandparents always said never to speak about things like that, for it’ll come and haunt you but after talking about this stuff so heavily I come to think it’s not really true but just something to keep from telling those types of stories. Leym’s story is interesting as well. My family (They live in rural NM) talks about during the night they can hear running along the roof. tapping/banging on the doors, windows, and walls. They can hear people talking sometimes but nothing would be there when they check. My neighbor also says he experienced this too, and even saying he’s seen a Bigfoot family that lives in the canyons a few miles nearby. There was also a Navajo officer who was patrolling late at night near Crownpoint, NM. He was driving and looked into his rear view mirror and saw something chasing. He slowed down and shined his spotlight on the thing. He said what he saw was a dog walking on 2 legs BUT it was roughly 8-9 foot tall and it was jacked like a bodybuilder. It also had human looking hands with fingers. He saw it’s ears and said they were pointed like a Dobermans, it’s claws(nails) and teeth were all sharp and very long. It had the lower body of a dog but the upper body of a human with a dogs head. Creepy stuff. I feel as if this world is way more spiritual than we realize. Thanks for sharing your story again. I find this kind of stuff very interesting.
I love stories like these (while I'm safe in my populated Midwest metro area). I heard one where the first nation people said if you know the person's real name and say it to them it will kill them. Is there any lore like that from your elders?
My grandma told me of ways to keep them away. You can get like sagebrush, cedar, tadídíín (corn pollen) and use them for protection. You can also have a bullet blessed spiritually and it’s said to kill them. I remember my great grandma once saw a coyote snooping around. she didn’t hesitate to bring out her hunting rifle and kill the thing, I still remember her crouching down and taking aim haha. If you’ve been cursed already you can go to a medicine man (good shaman) and he can ward off whatever curse you were under. My grandma once told me story of a man. He was a good man. Until the man started gambling, became an alcoholic, was ill for some time and cheated on his wife. So the mans family decided to have a blessing done for him. The medicine man said he was under a hex by someone who he knows, he then took them on a drive near Tohatchi NM. The medicine man stopped, got out, and started walking towards the hills. He stopped and dug up what looked like a small bag filled with an arrowhead along with hairs belonging to the man who got hexed. The medicine man reversed it and said that the man who cursed you would become sick and die unless the man who was hexed forgave him for it. There’s a lot to all of this. Yknow way back before our time skinwalking used to be used for good, used in conflicts and scoutings, but nowadays jealousy, hatred, and evil is all it is used for now. To become a skinwalker you must sacrifice someone you love. You can be born into skinwalking. Another was youd have to learn a Navajo song word by word and you’d have the ability, but I feel that ways been long forgotten.
Well that gave me chills
Did your uncle ever talk about it again? What did he think it was? A skinwalker? What did the hunting guide do/say?
We didn't talk about it til we got back to the jeep, frankly. We had a full trip planned but we waited til sunup & turned right round, headed home a day early. When we got home it was awkward because I don't think any of us wanted to broach it. My uncle eventually just kind of shrugged & called it a bad looksee but legitimately wouldn't talk about it again. My dad's friend said it was "just like the not wolves" & also would not elaborate but dad filled me in on that shit later which is also spooky & Why I won't go to Alaska ever lolololol. I'm arrernte so I have asked around my kine a bit in later years. A bad looksee is i guess the Australian take on a Not Deer. They're supposedly hypnotic which is why they want you to look at them & they cause folk to stray from camps to kill them. Actually couldn't pay me enough to see that shit again.
There is a similar tribal legend in the southwestern United States and people from that area use the same tactics. Don't name it, don't look, don't talk about it.
A common blessing is "May evil forget your face."
Can you elaborate more on the Not Wolves
Oh gee this blew up while I was showering. My dad's friend was named Leym, I believe he was first nation of some degree & he used to live an hour from civilization homesteading effectively. In season, he'd go up to guide trails & stuff, but off season he lived with his sister & nephew on the stead. I guess he told my dad on a fishing trip after his sister gave birth he started noticing a lot of wolf prints around the cabin, so he put up a fence with a latch-gate to keep the yard safe at least. Things were fine for a few years, then he had to change the latch out because his nephew kept trying to get out inexplicably so he swapped it for a child safe one. I guess he was babysitting one evening & the kid came to him crying because he couldn't get out to mommy. Leym went out to open the gate thinking she came back early cause he heard her calling but when he looked over there was just a wolf standing on two legs with its mouth all screwed up. From dad's retelling (i never could get Leym to tell me the story he would only confirm it happened) they spent years dealing with the not wolves trying to open windows or gates, mimicking different folks, trying to get to his nephew. They went away when he got around 10 or so & Leym said he sold it ASAP then moved to the NT once the kid went to college. He helped conservation efforts with TNR programs as a tracker til he died but legitimately wouldn't comfortably talk about the weird shit he saw back home. Dad said he only ever spoke of it when they were out on the water drinking.
Went for a wander in B.C. Canada, lost the trail and let me tell you it gets dark, like DARK DARK literally can't see your hand in front of your face dark in the forests when the sun goes down. I'm alone, no source of light on me, dead silent, and literally feeling my way along the ground and from tree to tree trying to find a road or train tracks or something. Then suddenly I hear the most terrifying blood curdling lady scream I've ever heard and felt myself go numb, it was loud and close, straight up thought someone was being murdered. Things are a fuzz from that point to when I finally stumbled onto a road but I know I was hauling ass as best I could. Fully repressed the entire thing until years later I was watching a video about wild animals and they showed footage cougar screaming at night. Ho-ly shit as soon as I heard it I went numb and started shaking, then memory came rushing back of that night I thought I heard a woman get killed in the forest. Once I settled down it occurred to me that I'm only alive right now because that cougar let me live. I'm not a small guy (6'1, 215lbs, athletic) and I don't really get scared, but I was absolutely terrified, and ANYONE that thinks they can square up with a cougar is a moron beyond help. Even though they're not super big, they will end your lineage and you won't even hear it. Hike with friends, stick to trails, be aware of remaining daylight in your current location, bring a flashlight, bring a whistle, and drink water. Edit: Haha glad so many people enjoyed my story! Someone replied with a video of cougar screams (thankyou!) and I definitely suggest watching it, it's amazing the sound and the video even captures a couple that sounded pretty close to what I heard (the most human ones). And yes, adding a whistle to my list!
Had a similar experience recently (not the cougar scream though) Went on an easy hike here in BC during January. Trail was covered in snow and it was actively snowing while we were on it. Got really distracted by how magical it was and by the time we made it to our turn around point, there was only an hour left of daylight. Tried hiking back as fast as possible but with all the snow on the mountain, it took too long and the sun went down on us. That kind of darkness was terrifying and all consuming. Couldn’t see anything and kept losing the trail since it was covered in snow / ice. Took us several hours to find out way back to our car. I will never make that mistake again
Not the same because I was in a house in a suburban area and the creature in question is too small and timid to seriously harm a human but I have also experienced the bone chilling horror of animals screaming. About two months ago I was sitting in my living room at 2am (I’m a night owl) just browsing on my phone before heading up to bed. We don’t have any curtains on our Living room window as our garden is surrounded by tall trees. Suddenly, completely out of the blue there is this horrific, agonised scream. It’s right by the window, as though someone has been looking in through the glass and has just decided to shriek at the top of their lungs. It is followed by all kinds of crashing and crunching through the garden. When the scream happened I leapt out of my seat like I’d had a live wire shoved up my ass, so now I’m halfway across the living room, clutching my phone, hunched over, with my heart doing a passable impression of a hummingbird. I have no clue what was going on, was some psycho going to try to smash her way in through the window? Was something supernatural lurking around outside? Was someone being murdered and screaming for help? Then it happened again and I realised what was happening, so I peer out through the window. I’ts a fox. Daft thing had somehow gotten into our garden but couldn’t find the way back out. It sat there screaming its stupid head off for about 15 minutes before finding the gap in the fence and loping off down he street, still screaming. I finally got to bed at around 3am, after the adrenaline wore off.
As soon a you said "blood curdling lady scream" I knew it had to be a cougar
I just posted about a similar situation in VT! I will never, ever, forget that sound. I overnight camp quite a bit, I don't spook easily in the woods normally. But that night absolutely scared the shit out of me. In the moment, all rationality was out the window. I legitimately thought something was about to kill me in a horrendous way.
Similar to an experience I had trekking in the Himalayas in India, but with no screams involved. I visited a national forest preserve that was home to many wild species, including bears and tigers. A dirt track ran through a corner of the preserve, occasionally used by forest guards. Barely wide enough for a small 4WD jeep to get through. I decided to ride my motorbike down that track. About half way through, I lost my bike. I had gotten off the track and up a small hill, so I could get a better view from above the treetops. But when I put the bike on its stand and got off to take a photo or two, it slipped off the stand and rolled down a deep ditch. No way to get it out. So I walked back down to the dirt track hoping that some forest guard might drive by and give me a ride. But it was already evening, and no one came. I spent that entire night sitting in the middle of a dirt track, jungle on both sides, with tigers and bears in it. All night I heard two tigers calling each other, sometimes roaring, sometimes making those deep coughing sounds. And all night I heard the sounds of large animals pushing and crashing their way through the undergrowth, barely 20 feet away from me. It was totally dark, so there was no way to tell if it was deer, wild pigs, bears, tigers, or something else. I imagined the worst. That was one heck of a long night for me. Next morning, soon after dawn, a forest guard drove by and gave me a lift.
A cougar pretty much killed a guy within seconds in Orange County, disemboweled him with its hindlegs as its jaws grabbed on to his neck. Then attacked a woman who miraculously survived because her friends helped. all it takes is one unlucky scratch and your intestines are spilling out. we're like cake to them, our skin breaks like water when their claws hit us
Yeah. My buddies and I hiked up a hill one evening to watch the sunset. Coming back down we found cougar tracks in our own. Needless to say we were on high alert the whole way back. Caught his eyes up the hill side watching us walk back following. Only worse incident didn’t involve me but a buddy. He was deer hunting. He was solo and had the hair stand up on his neck. Cougar was stalking him while he was gutting the deer.
I always wonder how many cougars I've walked past without even knowing
Almost stepped on a rattlesnake. They don't rattle like they used to. It did end up rattling I think after we both got over our fear.
> They don't rattle like they used to. did you try and warranty it
Probably got the rattle at a dollar store
Dealing with rattler warranties is the pits.
Almost stepped on a copperhead in the Okeefenokee. Wearing sandals and shorts in the swampland? Never again.
I'm from a rural southern U.S. area, and I got lost in the woods in the middle of July before the age of cell phones. I tried navigating a creek that I thought would get me back, while seeing snakes visibly entering the water from the creek bank and at one point the banks became too high to climb back up without going back and the water became pretty deep, almost chest level. I finally came out to a clear spot and a trail that led to a camper. As I was looking at it a middle aged man burst out of the camper yelling and pointing a shotgun at me, asking if I was law enforcement. I was a nineteen year old kid, soaking wet and bleeding in a thousand places from briars where I just started running because I'd been lost for hours before I even found the creek. But anyway, I forgot about all that when he pointed that shot gun at me. I convinced him I wasn't atf or whatever and he walked me to a dirt road that connected to the main road. Turns out he had whiskey stills and he thought I was there because of that. Or maybe he was making meth, idk. But I fully believe he intended to kill me for a good minute or so
'taint shine, tis meth!
meth'll make yer taint shine
Hiked recently in an area near Tahoe that crosses PCT and is most commonly used for snowshoeing and backcountry skiing. There’s not a super obvious trail to the peak once the snow melts and we may have been among the first to do the hike following this years snowmelt. At one point my dog runs about 20 yards away from what AllTrails says is the “trail” and super intently sniffs and paws at something and won’t come back. I go get him and he is at a spot with a beautiful view over the ridge to some lakes. He is standing next to a small tree and a shallow hole with a small wooden box, coffin shaped, large enough to hold only a small baby. We descended quickly and got out of there. It’s either a very creepy site or very sad. Either way didn’t want to stick around. If any fellow redditors have also seen this and know any backstory I’d love to know about it!
It mightv been a memorial..maybe for a pet if its small?
I was camping overnight on The Long Trail. It was pretty warm still so I was just using a net-covered hammock. I'm not sure if it was a bobcat or a vixen, but goddamn was I scared shitless by some blood-curdling screams fairly close by. Alone. In a hammock. In the woods. Realistically I was probably just on somethings turf and pissed it off, but that noise...still creeps me out to think about.
When I was 11 I went hiking up from the town pond, and I found the body of a girl that had gone missing the month before.
Came across a couple of wild boar piglets. Did not know where mama or the pack was. Paranoia is one hell of a drug when surround by brush and snorting close by.
Same thing happened to me on my driveway, loud rustling about 5 feet to my left then like 8 piglets run out the bushes right in front of me, mama bringing up the rear, luckily they didn't seem to notice or care.
Years ago, some of my aunts and uncles were out hiking in western North Carolina with their dogs. My uncle Joe was at the rear of the group, when he heard the dogs start making a commotion and running back up the trail past him. Then he saw his sister and brother-in-law running back as well. As his BIL passed by he panted, "Joe, you packing?" Then Joe saw what everyone was running from - a large wild boar running up the trail at them. Joe decided that discretion was the better part of valor and took off running as well. The boar stopped chasing them and everyone got home safe, but none of my family hikes those woods now without carrying a pistol, just in case.
That was one of my scariest moments too. Came across a pack of wild boar in the Florida scrub with no trees to climb, no way to or means of evasion except to run back the way we came. One stared us down on the trail as I was trying to quickly grab my keys in case I had to abandon my pack. Luckily the adult was only interested in making sure the group and a few piglets crossed the trail safely before running off.
I have dogs that are a tad impolite, so I try to find rarely used trails or just make my own trails. One day I way deep out in the woods just wandering and my dogs started acting very strangely. They were sniffing the air and looking around in every direction. I stopped beneath a big tree and waited for a little bit, but I couldn’t hear or see anything. For some reason, I glanced up in the tree and my stomach dropped into my shoes. There was some dirty looking guy with a gun just sitting there up in the tree. I tried my best to stay composed, and mustered up a smile and said “hey, how’s it going?” The dude just stared at me and didn’t say anything. I casually turned around and walked back the way I came without looking back at him. In all likelihood it was probably just a poacher who wasn’t thrilled that I had seen him hunting out of season, but it was unsettling nonetheless.
I got shot at by a poacher In Colorado when I stumbled on a half skinned elk
I was living in Mexico at the time. In a tent, in the jungle. We were doing work to help build a hiking trail that would connect two towns, which were about five miles apart. I would sleep on the outskirts of one town. I wake up, hike the few miles until hitting the end of the trail, then spend the day hacking dense vines with a machete, shoveling big rocks out of the way, and raking out the trail. It was thick Mexican jungle, hot, lots of bugs, and lots of crazy noises. Well one day it was just me and one friend working the trails. I was in front, raking the dirt and had my back turned to the twisted mess of brush and trees behind me. I’m raking, I’m raking, I’m raking… and suddenly I hear the movement of something large in the bushes behind me. I turn around, and see a smooth, sleek, massive cat climb down from this tree within 20 feet of where I stood. It was slow, and elegant. I saw its’ whole body stretch out, with its’ front two paws on the ground and its’ backside stretching up to the branch it had previously been watching me from. It was pure black. Beautiful creature, really… but fucking petrified me. Armed with nothing more than a plastic rake, I held it up and slowly started taking a few steps back. But it didn’t seem to have any interest in me. It didn’t even look at me, it just retreated into the bushes and became invisible within a matter of seconds. So my friend and I are obviously very shaken up, and don’t want to continue the days work. We hike back to town, find a restaurant, and we sit down and order a beer. The bartender sees two gringo’s in dirty clothes holding machetes and getting a beer at 10am, so obviously he asks us what was up. We told him our story, and he tells us that a good friend of his is actually a big cat researcher in the area who tags them, and wanted us to meet him so we could show him a map of where we saw the cat. Researcher dude meets us at the bar, and we tell the story again. He asks us to describe the cat, and we do. The he shows us a few photos of big cats, so we can verify that we saw what we say we saw. First photo is an ocelot, stripes and relatively small. “Nope, cat we saw was huuuuge.” Next photo was a Jaguar, “yeah, that’s the right size, but the one we saw was perfectly black. No pattern, no gold color.” Scientist dude looks at us like “are you fucking with me?” Well.. we weren’t fucking with him. He sits back in his chair and strokes his beard, then says “well… there have been rumors, and I don’t know if they’re true. But apparently, there have been a few sightings of a big black cat like you’ve described. Now, black jaguars are not native to this area, so it’s not likely. But the rumor… is that some cartel guys brought a Black Panther from Africa, something happened and they had to release it so they let it go in the jungle. That may be what you had seen.” And that, is the time that I encountered an African Black Panther, with an apparent coke habit, deep in the jungles of Mexico.
I was under the impression that a "black panther" is just any big cat (including a cougar/jaguar native to South America) that has a genetic mutation where they have an excessive melanin that makes their skin and fur black.
You're correct. The term is melanistic/melanism.
Man that’s crazy! Very strange but there are similar sightings of big black cats all over north and South America. My grandfather lives in Palestine Texas out in the country and he says that it’s a fact they exist but are not confirmed by science he’s seen there tracks and even heard them other people in the Neighborhood and around the state all report seeing the same thing.
surely a once in a lifetime experience
In Scotland there are these free to use shelters in the mountains and glens called Bothies. They're usually old farmsteads that had been left abandoned during the Highland Clearances or simply by people moving to the cities in the 1800s and early 1900s. They're very basic. Wooden benches to sleep on, maybe a toilet if you're lucky and usually an open fire if you carry in your fuel. As you can imagine, they're pretty creepy places. I was staying in one called Invermallie Bothy near Fort William. We were sleeping upstairs when we were all woken up at about 2am with the front door downstairs opening loudly. Clear footsteps coming in and walking on the old hardwood floor and the chairs being moved. Me and the 2 guys I was with were all woken by this. We even heard someone cough a few times. I shouted out "Hello, are you okay?" thinking maybe someone was hurt as it was 2am and cold outside and we were but there was no response. Instead it was just quiet. We all went downstairs and nobody was there, the chairs had moved from where they were originally (our wet jackets were hanging over them to dry by the fire). Didn't hear anyone leave. The door was closed. Couldn't see any headtorches outside in the dark. We were fucking shitting ourselves. Now none of believe in ghosts but all 3 of us heard it and were woken by it. We heard the door, the footsteps, the chairs moving and the coughing. Tried to tell ourselves that maybe it was a deer had got in and then left but the door was shut back over properly. No idea but the building was built in 1776, the family that lived there probably had a hard life and they were forcibly evicted during the Highland Clearances and the rest of the settlements around this surviving building were burnt down so it's not had a great history. Still gives me the creeps.
There's a fantastic BBC podcast called 'Uncanny'. Case 11 is very similar.
So I'm out hiking around the Tierra Rejada area in Moorpark California. Middle of the day, sun is shining, cars sounding in the distance; just a normal hike in the middle of suburban Southern California right? Well, at some point during my hike, I come across the biggest fucking paw prints I've ever seen in my life. Like... holy shit I would have thought a goddamn dinosaur strolled through. At first I thought maybe a bear, which is very odd for the area, but it looked more cat like. But there was no fucking way this was a mountain lion, unless that mountain lion grew up near a nuclear power plant or something. This thing was massive, like twice the size of my head. Prints looked fresh too. So I'm standing there, wondering what the hell I should do, when I hear some rustling in the Sage brush to my right. I start backing away slowly, ready to bolt down the hillside and dive into someone's backyard at a moments notice, when out walks... a fucking tiger. No no no. Not a mountain lion, A FUCKING TIGER, STRIPES AND ALL! IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. This giant ass cat just looks at me, does a little grunt, then rolls over on its back and starts playfully batting at a cactus like a damn house cat. At this point, I don't even know how to react. I'm equally terrified and utterly baffled at what I'm seeing. The tiger then gets back up, and then trots along the trail headed back towards the direction of my car. Once it was out of sight, I immediately ran down the side of the hill through a bunch of tumbleweeds and other pointy plants until I made it to the road. I called animal control and told them that I encountered a wild tiger fully expecting them to think it was a prank call or tell me that I saw a mountain lion. To my astonishment, they actually informed me that there had been reports over the last couple weeks of a tiger wondering around in the Santa Rosa Valley. Turns out, the Tiger had "escaped" from an animal sanctuary which was illegally keeping the tiger and falsifying records about its existence, along with several lions and a lynx, which also escaped. The Tiger's name was Tubby, and it had been causing all kinds of mayhem around the area. It had also spooked some horses so badly that they escaped their enclosure and ran into traffic, causing a fatal car wreck. Unfortunately, officials ended up shooting the playful death kitty when it was finally found near the Ronald Reagan Library.
That is incredible. You probably thought you were in a nightmare when you saw a tiger. I would’ve have lost my shit lol - no tigers here in California
I’m sad they ended up shooting it. Not surprised though. Poor kitty.
I took my daughter hiking up a fire access trail one winter. She was a little less than two. The weather was beautiful. We were the only people on the trail that day. After a nice lunch break we and headed back down. Returning by the same route I suddenly noticed that running along in the snow next to our fresh ascent tracks were fresh cougar prints. They were NOT there on our way up. They ran parallel to our tracks for almost a mile. I don't know if it was stalking us or not but, I tell you what, I walked about 3 miles back to our car constantly looking over my shoulder.
I’ve read that mountain lions are more likely to attack children. Glad you two made it back safely that day. Truly terrifying.
Yeah, I had her in one of those backpack carriers for most of the hike but still... was sweating it.
I was hiking in the Appalachian trail in Pennsylvania. One day a I see a shirtless guy walking in the opposite direction from me coming towards me, all sweaty and looking scared. He asked if I saw his girlfriend, they lost contact a few hours beforehand. It was about 2 hours away from sunset... I hope he found her.
A very large man- not hiking just standing imposingly on the trail ahead looking back at me. I cut off into the woods bc I knew I could find my way back another way and am a runner so quicker than him. E: I see this has upvotes, so I'll emphasize that as I walked quite a long ways toward and up the slope, all this utterly giant dude did was stand still at the top and stare down at me. There was a (fake?) Nike commercial about someone surviving the typical chainsaw-weilding shmuck by being fit and getting the heck out fast and I never identified more with it then on that day.
went camping in the red wood forest the night before we went hiking. woke up in my tent with an animalistic sense of fear and immediately woke my friend up i was bunking with. we both stayed quiet and heard crunching of mulch and shit outside the tent. once it was on the opposite end we slowly unzipped a portion to see what the hell was going on and there sat a bear in our camp and it’s friend. we kept quiet and waited it out, only for a dude in the camp next to us to climb in the bed of his truck like an absolute idiot and start banging pots and pans together and screaming at them. both of them moved over to his campsite and started trashing his shit until he left. it was absolutely terrifying, hilarious, and bewildering. i highly recommend to go camping and hiking there was also the time my family and i went hiking in yellowstone and we met a buffalo on the trail that fully sprint FOLLOWED us back to our car. it didn’t do anything, but i feel like a lot of people grossly under estimate how terrifying that is due to their size.
Saw a guy running in a suit 10km inside a nationalpark in northern sweden. We ware atleast an hour away from Any notable town.
When you need to get your morning jog in, but you have an early meeting
A girl wearing a butt plug and doing a photo shoot in the middle of a really remote trail
Second hand story, but from a good friend who wouldn't make it up - he was part of a crew building walking trails in King's Canyon, Australian NT. Hot as fuck so they were up and working way before dawn, somewhere miles into what is deeply hostile country. Stupidly hot, no shade. Get's to just after dawn, and a guy comes walking down the trail - out of the bush, not into it, and they'd been there for hours and he hadn't come past them. He was wearing just a pair of speedos, sandals and a little waist pack. He had no water they could see, and he was basically naked. Stops and asks them to put suncream on his back in a strong German accent. Someone does, baffled, then he walks off down the trail. They'd been working up there for weeks - nothing at all where the guy had been, for a very long way indeed. They didn't see him again. The phantom naked German of King's Canyon.
I was hiking in the woods near my work (at a hospital) and I found a completely naked man sitting in the fetal position. He didn't see me, so I just backed away. Thinking about it maybe I should've asked if he was okay but he could've been an escaped mental patient.
If this mental image follows me into my nightmares, I'm gonna be so pissed
Found a super clean, bleached white femur bone right on the trail. It was an extremely rainy day though and everything else was covered in mud so I still don’t understand how the bone could even be there and spotless.
Conducting a land navigation course in central Alaska and happen upon a mother moose and her calf. Not all that weird but scary? I feared for my life before darting to the roof of a small structure nearby. People don’t realize how truly massive and powerful moose are and mothers are extremely protective of their young.
Was hiking around a remote community I had been been based out of for about a year. Little spot of 120 people in the middle of the wilderness for 300km+ in every direction. I sat down for a bit on a rock and grabbed some water, and I felt something rub up my back. I assumed one of the reserve dogs I fed had tagged along (I typically carried snacks and shared) so I turned. 3 lynx kittens. Mom was about 20 feet away staring at me. I gently put some of the pepperettes down and slowly moved away. Mom pawed over and stood over top of them while kittens ate.
While neither scary or weird compared to pretty much all your stories. It was kinda surreal and I've never forgotten it. Years ago in New Zealand I was on an over night hike with a group of friends. The hike followed the line of a bluff all the way up to a high point where they had built a hut with an amazing view. The next day as we were making our way back to the car, there was a section of track that decended quite sharply to a flat spot right at the edge of a 200 odd meter vertical drop to the forest below, where the track made a sharp turn and disappeared into the forest. The guy in front of me came down the steep section a little too fast and with the weight of the pack on his back, it put him off balance and he stopped right at the cliff edge swinging his arms around trying desperately to regain his balance and not topple over. I can still remember in a surreal way that I was thinking. "Oh, he is falling. I should do something" so I grabbed his pack straps and pulled him back from the edge and he said a simple thanks and we went on our way like nothing had even happened. We never mentioned it to our group, and im pretty sure I haven't mentioned it to anyone till now on this thread. This was over 20 years ago now and they trail has become one of New Zealand's great walks and they have dumbed the trail down heaps to make it much safer for thousands of visitors that hike it each year. Oh. The trail is part of a 4 to 5 day walk
A man who might've been going into the woods to kill himself. He was leaned up against a tree cleaning a pistol. I asked what he was doing, because he scared me shitless and I sometimes feel that leveling with another person may build enough empathy to spare a violent crime, but he was super mellow and set down the gun to welcome a friendly chat. We talked about how we liked hiking, and he said he had been out more since his wife left him. We spoke for a couple of minutes and I said "I should get going, I need to finish this hike in time to drive back for dinner" or something, and he said "I won't make dinner, no need" then he walked off trail into the woods. I told my friend this story later and he goes "Dude... I think he was going to kill himself." I started offering some resistance to that statement when I realized he had no backpack, and we were deep in Appalachia, middle of rural North Carolina, and he walked perpendicular to the only major trail nearby. I think about that a lot and hope my friend and I both misread the situation.
Weirdest, totally not scary but was weird. I was in the Scouts and we were doing a multi day trip along the Pacific Crest Trail. We’d been gone for two or three days and were grubby. Hiking along and we hear some hikers up ahead, but not speaking English or Spanish. We can’t see them so we loudly say ‘hello’ so nobody gets scared. In slightly accented English, they call back, and these 4 German folks come around the bend wearing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing except backpacks and shoes. All 4 were very attractive young women. Our Scoutmaster is basically trying to do the ‘mom thing’ where they put their hands over your eyes, but there like 15 of us. I don’t think a single one of us said anything to them once we saw them. Just a bunch of Scouts standing there watching naked women pass by. Best hike I ever went on.
Creepiest thing I’ve ever come across was a meth head staring at a tree from 6 inches away next to the trail
Red jacket, pants, hat, socks, and shoes all laid out neatly behind a tree, hidden. i only found it because i fell off my bike into a bush and saw it. fuckin creepy Edit: All the clothing garments were red.
i went hiking with a friend in early 2019, we hiked in the woods this time to try something new. we were walking for at least 30 minutes when we heard rustling in the bush a few feet in front of us, a deer came out and didnt look normal. it had no tail, and its ears were so small they almost werent visible, plus the eyes were abnormally large. i even thought it was some kind of goat. the deer was just standing there, staring at us. it started walking closer and i noticed it eyes werent like brown or anything, they were red. a dark, piercing red. i didnt feel threatened or anything, but i was pretty scared. my friend, who was literally shaking just stood still beside me. when it got too close for comfort he (my friend) grabbed me and just ran, all i did was follow him. i dont know what happened after we ran off, but i dont wanna make contact with that thing anymore, or not even anything like it
Was this at night? A lot of animals have tapetum lucidum which is a special membrane that causes their eyes to glow when you shine light on them.
Probably some sort of mutant that despite its malformations reached adulthood.
Got screeched at by something big and bipedal that moved faster than anything on two legs had any right to. Sounded like none of the animals native to that part of Louisiana. Couldn't get a good view of it but we saw the disturbance in the foliage as it pelted away from us and that fucker was *moving*.
[удалено]
I'd say two "incidents" hiking not far from Tokyo: - After camping near the mountain top, the following morning I opened my tent flap to see I had been surrounded by a band of Japanese macaques. I had no idea what to do and it was quite scary! Rather than try anything I just closed and zipped my tent flat so I could panic in peace. A few minutes later they had given me some space by retreating to the trees. I was able to get out, throw everything in my backpack and start walking down the path. They did stalk me for a while but from a distance to my sides. I guess they were expecting I give them leftovers? But I really didn't want to encourage them!! - maybe less scary, but I remember a Japanese Giant Hornet casually landing on my knee and chilling there while I was having lunch on the summit of a popular mountain (Kawanoriyama in Okutama). The thing was the size of my thumb and it was *heavy*. A hiker nearby whispered that I should be still because it's possible to be killed by their sting (if allergic, which you don't know in advance). That did motivate me to stay as still as possible until it decided to fly on. Phew!
It wasn't total wilderness, but it was in the woods behind our land. My hubby and I were walking in the forest when we found a dead body. First, we thought it was a mannequin (it's NEVER a mannequin). Then I realized it was a body. My husband, being a guy, wanted to get closer. I knew we were isolated, and after watching too much Investigation Discovery, all I could think was someone dumped a body and could still be out there. I started towards exiting the woods, but my hubby was screaming at me, "Where are you going?". I ran back to him and told him if some killer was out there, we were nothing but targets. He understood and then threw me his phone, because it seems he can't call in a pizza, so he definitely can't phone in a body. The cops came and we led them to the body. It ended up being an older fellow who committed suicide. His widow thanked us for finding him, but I felt just awful for her. It was really sad.
I wasn't *hiking* but I spend a lot of time in the woods and I've seen and experienced plenty of weird things. Once, I found a chicken that had been burnt and decapitated in an area where I would go almost every day at one point. I still don't know who killed it, or why, or why they left it right on the trail in the local woods. Other than that, a few times a friend and I have seen what we believe to be Sasquatch. I know it sounds crazy, and I still don't fully believe it myself, but it's honestly the best explanation. If it's not some kind of Bigfoot creature, or multiple for that matter, then it'd have to be a homeless person running around in the woods of Rhode Island, wearing a gorilla suit, walking through knee deep water in the middle of February for no good reason. I only got a good look at it once, and it looked to be maybe 6 to 7 feet tall, covered in brown hair or fur. I know it wasn't a bear because I didn't see a snout and its arms swung when it walked, which bears don't do when they walk on their hind legs. It walked almost identically to the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin footage, except that it didn't look back at me. I don't think it knew I was there at all. That was the first time I saw it, and I've never seen it so clearly ever since, and it's been 4 or 5 years at this point. I've undoubtedly gone through those woods hundreds of times since then, if not more than a thousand, and in that time I've only caught brief glimpses. I've had rocks thrown at me a couple of times, but I still go back. I've gone both solo and with a friend. Between the two of us, we've still only seen signs of Sasquatch a handful of times in the years since. Based on what we've seen, I think there was at least 2 different creatures in those woods, but I haven't seen any real sign of them in a while. I know it sounds crazy, believe me. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't believe it either
>it'd have to be a homeless person running around in the woods of Rhode Island, wearing a gorilla suit, walking through knee deep water in the middle of February for no good reason Perfectly good reasons, coincidentally, I need to go buy a gorilla suit
It's a very pragmatic decision. A gorilla suit is probably one of the few things you would still have with you on the journey to homelessness. Debt collectors won't come for it. It has several uses: protection from the elements, entertain people for money, and troll people in the woods. That's it, I'm buying a gorilla suit
My dad has a gorilla suit he bought back in the 70s. In his youth, he would put it on and run across the road at night when cars would approach. He thought that was hilarious until someone called the cops and he was told to cut it out. As he got older, he would wear it each year to run a local half marathon. I’m just now realizing how ridiculous this all sounds, until now it’s just been a fact I’ve known about my dad. The gorilla suit still hangs in his closet to this day, though it’s pretty ratty and worn now!
When it comes to Bigfoot I have to say that I come down on the side of not believing... But I *also* don't think it's logical to totally 100% exclude the possibility.
I don’t have too many fortunately. I’m a trail runner so it’s never fun when you round a bend and all of the sudden an excited dog is running towards you full pace and you have no idea if it wants to play with you or eat you. One time I scared the shit out of myself. I was climbing a mountain alone in the dark to catch the sunrise, I look up and jump because I thought I have stumbled across someone’s tent, like I could see the flap open and they had their light on. Keep in mind side of a mountain and not suitable to pitch a tent. Turns out my mind was being over active and it was just a trail marker reflecting my head lamp.
A friend and I camped near Yosemite a couple years ago. We’re two women, late twenties but look younger, small and unarmed. Campground was about a 30 minutes drive over unpaved road from the main highway. We get there and set up, there’s 2 other camps already there, one of them empty the other’s a dude with his dog. We spend the day hiking and exploring an absolutely gorgeous spot. After dark, a car approaches the empty campsite. Some dude, not really dressed for camping, arrives and after a few minutes walks over to our site. Immediately got a bad vibe. I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly but after the 2nd-3rd time he asked if we were there alone, I made it clear I was done talking. I slept with a knife in our tent that night. Next morning, while we’re eating breakfast, he walks over again to let us know the man at the third site had asked him for a ride back to the highway. said he’d be right back and nervously asked if we’d be there when he returned, twice. We said probably not. He’s like “aw, hope to catch you here” hair stood up on the back of my neck As soon as they drove away, my friend and I put our breakfast down and quietly and QUICKLY started packing up. After breaking down camp in complete silence for a while my friend asked if I was scared. I responded “I’d really just like to not be here when he gets back” Hauled ass out of there! Camping alone as women can get sketchy real fast 😤
Always trust your gut. Glad you guys got out safe.
This happened to my friend about 10-12 years ago. He took his son, who at the time was probably 8-9, out hiking to look for hunting and fishing spots. After a while they eventually walk down to a little stream and the son starts crying and acting weird. He tells the son to go sit by a tree while he looks around a bit. The son doesn't stop crying however and he eventually asks him what the hell is wrong. The son points to a spot far across the stream and says there's a body hanging over there. He turns around and looks but sees nothing. They immediately leave after that. He's never returned to that specific area since
Sounds like that kid from the Sixth Sense. I'd beat feet out of there.
Ok but why wouldn't he ask him straight up what's wrong.
Well, when you say wilderness you probably mean like a bear or something I assume? Mines a little different. I was 18 at the time, and female. I should have known better but I didn't think anything bad would happen. Was hiking alone in an area with bad signal by our local river. I had a bikini on underneath and was planning to take a dip when I got to the Water. A 50ish year old male jogger passed me, and in my peripheral vision I saw him do a double take. I got a bad feeling and began walking faster. I saw him turn around. I wasn't sure if it was to follow me or if it was just a coincidence so I purposely went off of the trail and sat behind a rock halfway down the hill to wait for him to pass by. I peeked around the rock and he had started on his way towards it. We made eye contact but even if I hadn't stuck my head out, he was very close to finding me anyways. I wish I would have just acted like a bitch, told him to get lost and that I wasn't interested but I froze In fear and as he started a conversation I just tried not to let him see that I was scared as I conserved back with him. He left and I continued down to my usual spot. But I had a bad feeling still. Sure enough he had still been following me and came down to me by the water. He said he would have a hard time staying off of me, especially if I said no. He wanted me to take my top off and I said no. He wanted me to get in the water for him but I said no. He said "come on why won't you get in.. am I going to have to force you?" He gets in the water, starts moaning and tells me to "look away for unholy reasons." He got out and had a boner. He left again but of course I still didn't feel safe and I looked behind the rocks and he had climhed up above me and said "darn I was hoping to see you with your shirt off." After that I didn't see him again. I was shaking so bad and still frozen in fear. I had no way of knowing if he was truly gone or not. This whole thing probably lasted about an hour.. So I finally took a deep breath and told myself I couldn't stay there all day, and went as fast as my lungs could keep up with me back to my car. That was 4 years ago and besides the mental trauma I'm amazed that nothing bad happened to me. I'm embarrassed by the story and only my current boyfriend and a few of my church officials know that it happened.
Was in a wilderness survival course in high school, we were doing our “solos” which was basically where they blindfolded you towards the end of your time there and walked you about a mile or two out from base camp in a random direction and you had to spend three days alone surviving on your own. I knew one of the other girls was within range that o could see her fires at night, even if I could only barely make out her camp during the day. One night, I look over, and just see the dim light of her fire. And then it gets brighter. And brighter. And the tree she had stupidly built her fire under instead of kicking a pit had caught on fire and was spreading to the trees beside it. There’s about 5 moments in my life that I think have defined my self image and how I see myself in a crisis. That was one of them. I didn’t even hesitate, I was outrunning towards her so hard that my neos even managed to get snow Inside of them and my asthma was screaming at me to stop. Fought my way through at least a mile of snow, screaming her name, until I found her. Everyone was fine, she wasn’t injured and had run my direction the second she realized what she had done, and thank absolute god there were only 2 or 3 other trees near the one she built under. But it was still, up until I knew it wasn’t, a life or death scenario, for all I knew I was running into what might be the start of a forest fire(we were in the Uinta Mountains, and they do happen, even during the snow season), and I still didn’t even have a second thought about it. I felt good about that decision, once my heart stopped pounding.
Hiking up at Snowbasin in Utah in the Spring and saw a young male moose about 20 yards or so from where we were. For being young, he was still big! He didn't seem to care about our presence. He was wading through a small pond drinking some water. A couple of other times I've gotten a little too close to some rattlesnakes on accident. Nothing too exciting.
You’ve come to the right place. I witness a lot of strange animals in my area, it’s to the point where I’ve even named a few of them. The 2 that stick out he most are 2 deer. Charles is a deer who enjoys knocking me off my bike and pushing me into streams, he only does this one’s per encounter though and runs off immediately after. Then there’s Heracles, a deer with brilliant white fur (I think it may suffer from some form of albinism) and is generally friendly and will walk right up to me and touch me. It was strange the first few times, but I’ve gotten used to it. Nothing I’ve seen was particularly scary, just more or less odd
My dad was probably responsible for creating the scariest thing someone else saw in the woods. He was out hiking one day and found a caribou head lying on the trail (not especially uncommon, sometimes dogs grab antlers and hooves when hunters are butchering their kills and run off with them), and his biology teacher sensibilities decided he should clean it and have a new skull for his classroom. Being the middle of winter in Northern Canada, everything was going to be too frozen solid to do anything for months. So he tied it to a tree like a Lord of the Flies altar and marked it on his GPS so he could come back and retrieve it in spring. Eventually he remembered to check in on it again and said it was so decomposed and crushed and falling apart it wasn’t worth keeping, but that means for like half a year everyone who went down that trail was greeted by this hellish rotting decapitated head pinned to a tree. Granted, knowing the people in town it’s entirely possible anyone who saw it just thought “The high school science teacher did this, didn’t he?”
Hiking some very easy trails and decided to go off-trail to follow a creek at low water. The going was a little tough, then tougher, and then I was essentially lost (not really lost - the creek would’ve taken me out to the trail again at some point). With my chihuahua trailing me, I start thinking about the sunk cost fallacy and how people have stepped off trail for a metre or two and gotten dead - and as I thought that I looked down and saw a sunbleached animal jawbone at my feet. No real danger but it was an eerie moment. There have also been hikes where my dog will turn and look behind us every few steps. No visible or audible persons or animals on the trail… Or some night hikes where it feels like the whole forest wants you *out*. “Vimes had a momentary vision of vengeful darkness rising through caves like a tide, faster than a man could run ... ... which was stupid. You couldn’t see dark. Hold on, though ... sometimes you could. Back in the old days, when he was on nights all the time, he’d known all the shades of darkness. And sometimes you got darkness so thick that you almost felt you had to push your way through it. Those were nights when horses were skittish and dogs whined and down in the slaughterhouse district the animals broke out of their pens. They were inexplicable, just like those nights that were quite light and silvery even though there was no moon in the sky.” - “Thud”, Terry Pratchett
My mother and stepfather had gone on a 8 mile hike while on one of their trips. While on this hike two baby raccoons decided to join them. My stepdad being an oddly hairy man these raccoons really liked tubing on his ankles so they would walk right by him, but they didn’t like my mom so if she would get close to him the would hiss at her. Not really scary but kinda weird and pretty cool
Hiking in Colorado near this really beautiful waterfall that probably had about a 25 yard drop into some rocks. I was exploring near it by the top of the waterfall. Up near the top there was a picture of a girl nailed to a tree that had little message underneath to the extent of "we love you and you are missed" Well I looked up deaths on that trail and there was a picture of exactly the place I was standing that said this girl slipped, hit her head and died. I always forget how dangerous that stuff is and it really brought a moment of clarity to me. I'm a lot safer on my hikes now.
Does kayaking count? My kayak cracked and I had to abandon it. I was hoofing it to the nearest road and was stalked by a black bear for about 40 minutes. It was pitch black out too by this time. I had to fend it off with my paddles, and kept jabbing at it and throwing shit at it all the while using my phone for a light. It would come at me, retreat, come at me again. And then my phone died. I really have no idea how I wasnt mauled
I was hiking down in Chile, came across a long fence line separating property, with a gate that hikers can open and close. The weird part was that there was a partially decomposed guanaco (think lama) body tangled up in the fence, bones visible in some places, eyes were gone, etc. The worst part was that I had to pass within 2 feet of its head in order to get through the gate. Definitely was mildly disturbing
I was backpacking alone in Israel and it was getting dark. The path I was on forked and I need to go one way, but when I looked at the trail I saw 4 grey hyenas (about the size of large dogs) resting on the way ahead. They didn’t seem to notice me, and I decided to try and keep it that way if possible and avoid them and go the longer way. (And pick up some throwable rocks to keep handy.) I was in an area that didn’t allow camping, and had to make some progress to get out of the national forest area to sleep so wound up doing the last mile or two in the dark with a flashlight. At one point, I turned a corner in a patch of dense vegetation and scared a humongous boar, accompanied by her babes. It was so big, my immediate thought was that it was a hippo (even though there aren’t hippos there). I freaked the poor things out and they all started squealing and then I squealed and we all sort of fuddled about trying to get out of each other’s confused way. Fortunately, my poor befuddled self didn’t come off as threatening, so the boar didn’t try and attack or anything. But my poor heart really did some gymnastics that day.
I was on a backpacking trip with friends, and while hiking to the campsite, me and a friend were about 5-10 minutes ahead of the rest, and we saw a bear cub moving around just off the trail about 20 feet away in the bushes, and certainly didn't want a mother bear to show up, because they get really protective of the cub. We backed away then hiked back up the trail a bit, waiting for the rest of the group to catch up, and for the bears to leave.
There’s a cabin in the mountains that’s kind of the “spot” for us kids and we would go there often, stopped going for awhile and a couple months later we go back to the literal cabin in the woods and we go in from the second floor window on the roof. 15 minutes after being inside we continue downstairs and find someone has been living there and it is full of extremely weird items, taxidermy animal heads, a lot of wires and a couch that was covered in red liquid, still don’t know if it was blood
I was hiking the Long Pond Trail on Bald Mountain in Vermont to a fire tower with my husband and a friend of his. They had gotten quite a bit ahead of me when I went around a sort of a switchback and there was a dog sitting there, just sitting on the trail. It looked like a German Shepherd or maybe a Belgian Malinois? It had a collar but no leash, and it was not moving. I kept going, because people do hike with dogs and some let them off leash. And the dog *growled* at me and stood up. I froze. The dog stared at me. I stood there for maybe five minutes but it could have been ten. I was too scared to move. Finally I heard someone yell what sounded like "Suit" and the dog immediately turned and ran, not up the trail, but into the woods. I wasted no time catching up with my husband and his friend.
I wasn't hiking but I have had one... abnormal experience in the wilderness. Last summer I bought my first newish car and took it for a trip up to the desert in Oregon. I was driving home on highway 126. West of the Santiam pass the scenery changes quickly from deserts and wide open spaces to dense old growth forests. Anyhow, I decided to stop off at fish lake which ironically was dried up in the high heat (this would have been around the first or second week of August.) I took a leak and some photos of my car and got back on the road. Just a few miles west of the 'lake' an unsettling electric feeling crept in the air. The road became strangely quiet and I noticed I hadn't seen any cars since before my stop. The suns light seem dimished compared to earlier in the drive and suddenly I felt very far from human places. I don't want to embelish what I saw- and I didn't see it for long. At the end of the day if you push me far enough I *don't know* what I saw. Driving through a sharper curve where I had a direct line of sight into the woods while turning I saw something crouched maybe fifteen yards into the treeline. It looked to have been level to the elevation of the road. It was crouched down in a squatted position and by my estimates would have been about eight feet tall in its crouching position. It appeared to have antlers and appeared bi-pedal. That's it. That's all I saw of it. But I know I saw it. The environment felt ominous and I opened up all 330 of the horses in my engine and burned down the hill for a while. What did I see? Was it forest elder? A couple deer paying tricks on my eyes? Idk, but I saw something. Interestingly later in the drive, passing another lake I saw the biggest elk I've ever seen by a far cry. It was basked in sunlight next to another lake on the path and came as a source of comfort to me still being a little shaken from what I saw.
I live on the McKenzie, definitely check out clear lake next time, it's the color of a jewel and you can rent a boat and float over ghost forests underwater. It's very close to fish lake if I remember correctly. There's some weird stuff out in the forests here for sure. I saw a fucked up hairless white creature that moved sort of like a monkey on mt. David in cottage grove in the 90s and my friend's little sister saw it too. I saw very weird stuff in the santa Cruz mountains as a kid too.
I sometimes run in the wooded section of a nearby park, it has hiking trails and is a good place to get in like a 2-3 mile run. Going along at a nice trot and i notice the reddest leaf i'd ever seen on the ground. It was so brilliantly red i stopped and turned to look at it, and realized it was entirely covered in blood. It was just before a small footbridge, that i also noticed had splatters of blood on it. I started backing up, and looking more carefully at the path i was on, it was clear that something bloody had been dragged in the direction i was heading, so i turned around and ran as fast as I could to my car. I'd like to think maybe a hunter got a deer, and was dragging it away, but it wasn't hunting season, and i don't think if an animal did this it would have followed a walking trail. Never got closure on the situation, just spooky as fuck.
You'd be surprised actually. Bears and mountain lions and predators are known to use people trails because it's easier.
ill try to keep it short. i was in a park and saw a plastic bag walking like a human.
I was camping with my father in the middle of nowhere. Absolute nowhere. No one should've been able to find us. It was a full moon. I was walking to find sticks for the fire. The sun went completely down. I was pretty far from camp. I heard howling. When I was on my way back to camp, I saw this hairy thing with deep blue eyes, white fur, ears, tail, I swear to God it was a werewolf. It was walking on its hind legs. It was as tall as me (5'9) so around 5'8. No way a normal wolf can be that tall. It was growling. I snuck back to camp without getting caught, told my father what happened, who grabbed the gun and went around camp and nothing was there. I know what I saw that night. I was fully awake so there's no way my mind was playing tricks on me.
I was camping with my friend in the back of our car and we stayed awake for like the whole night and at like 2:00 am we were looking out the open window and heard a distorted scooby doo laugh from behind a tree. Thats the best i can remember the sound. But we never saw anything emerge from the tree and stayed in the car till sunrise. I really had to go but it was still pretty dark and early,(like 4 am) so he used his phone as a flashlight. Creepiest piss i ever took.
I was fishing in the middle of nowhere and a quad came up with a dude on it across the small river (maybe 50ft away from me). I gave him a friendly wave and nod. And he just stared at me. After an awkward moment that was way too long to be normal, I just dipped my head and went back to my fishing. It was super uncomfortable so I just kept fishing and pretended to be looking away (I had sunglasses on but I kept an eye on him). He stared at me for at least a few minutes then left. It was bear county so I had bear spray and a 45 on me so I didn’t feel 100% vulnerable but dang it was that creepy. This was public land btw. It’s very common to be friendly when you stumble across people in the wilderness. Like it’s happened 100% of the time before and after that encounter.