What's the strangest/scariest thing you've ever experienced in the woods?

[red_zr24x4]

When I lived out west back in the 80s a couple friends and I were backpacking through the Sierras on one of our summer trips. We stopped for the night at a place called Junction Meadow, hung our bear bags, set up camp, etc., and we were awakened in the early morning hours by the sounds of bears grunting. We exited our tents and saw a mama bear and her cubs eating all our food. I guess we didn't do a good enough job hanging our bear bags. We tried scaring them off by making noise, but it didn't work. We ended up with ONE 1 oz. packet of oatmeal to last the three of us for a full additional week.

Survival time.

I got through it okay though, everyone else not so much

FIFY

 

[Franc]

A few years ago a neighbor called me about some teenagers camping in the woods on my land. I went there to check and found an empty tent with drug paraphernalia. I had to call for police escort while my contractor was cleaning up the site.

 

[Max Volume]

Being stalked by a mamma moose with a youngster in tow at Isle Royale National Park while on a kayak trip. Got rather tense for a few minutes. Gave this one a wide berth the next year. No telephoto, just an instant waterproof camera. Them youngsters are larger than a full grown whitetail.

 

[canebreaker]

My 2 teenaged boys and I walked into the woods to deer hunt. Each stepped off the path to where they wanted to sit. It was one of those gloomy overcast days, could see the clouds rolling as the sun came up. I was down the path about 100 yds when every hair on my body stood up. Lightening stroke a tree some 20 feet away. I lost my hearing the rest of the day.

 

[Alamo]

I’ve been thinking real hard, and I can’t ever remember really being truly scared in the woods. Civilization … different matter. I used to roam in woods a lot when I was a kid and maybe I was just too ignorant to be scared.

I do recall participating in scaring the hell out of some other scouts in the woods.

I was on the camp staff of the Maumee Reservation Boy Scout Camp in Jackson County/Hoosier National Forest during summers in high school.

One time my home Troop 190 from Nashville was in camp. Their camp site was just out of sight of the lake, but only a two minute walk at most. Campers and staff alike used two-man tents with canvas cots. There were about eight or so boys camping with the troop that week, plus a leader or two. As a staff member my tent was in a different area.

One night it was very foggy, and some of my fellow staff members let me know they were going to take a bullhorn out on the lake in a canoe and make some monster noises.

I headed down to visit my troop after dark, and as we were sitting around the picnic table, we started hearing moaning and growling sounds off the lake. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time, the boys from my troop were around 12 or 13. I said let’s go see what’s up. We headed down the path through the brush until we got to the edge of the lake.

The fog was really socked in, you could barely see 10 feet into them lake (which was pretty big), But once in a while it would clear a bit, and I could would see a canoe glide by with three or four of my staff buddies in it. The boys didn’t catch sight of them tho. They spent a lot of time telling each other that it was just a prank by the staff, there really weren’t any monsters or ghosts or whatever out there on the lake.

I was standing behind them while we watched, and pretty soon I got bored, so I just turned around and went back to the campsite. I could move pretty quietly, and none of the boys noticed me leave at first.

Almost back to the campsite when I heard the thunder of a mighty herd of Buffalo stampeding behind me. The boys burst out of the bushes, yelling “WHERE DID YOU GO?! WE DIDN’T KNOW YOU LEFT! HOLY CRAP!”

They hung tight to me for a while, but then I had to go back to my own staff tent for the night and left them.

Next day the scout leader told me that all the boys slept in the same town that night.

 

[Vanderbilt]

....some funny tales here, lol.....regarding the Bigfoot/Sasquatch stories.....I belong to a BP club that owns a fair piece of ground in Brown County.....we sometimes tell local tales at over nite camps or at the Fall Rendevous.....makes for some interesting conversations, especially when someone regales us with a new tale, lol.....my wife has a friend that their family has a homestead a couple ridges away. We were invited to a party a summer back, a few of us got to exchanging stories. My wife's friend stood up and proclaimed "are you all kidding me, we have Saquatches out here"? That was good for a few chuckles.....

 

[LtScott14]

While deer hunting in local woods, in my stand at daybreak, kept seeing a white object kinda fluttering in wind. As I had binoculars, got closer look, and a pretty big tree in my view had something attached. After a couple hours, I climbed down and walked over and got a laugh.

It was a Dolly Parton Brasseire wrapped around the tree, and it was filled with acorns!
My Uncle was about 1/4 mile away, and was walking towards me on a firebreak road in the woods.
I pointed out the Dolly Tree, and he also had a laugh going.

We didnt't get any deer that day, but had a good laugh and surmised that the squirrels had filled it with acorns knowing winter was coming soon.

Went back to the same area, but couldn't find that Dolly tree again. Sat in my stand for hours "glassing" the woods, and nada. No deer either.
Maybe they didn't like C&W music?

 

[DragonGunner]

My encounter with Bigfoot in the Laketon Bog. During the annual Bigfoot ATV Festival every year.

 

[Wabatuckian]

At a place between Wabash and Peru, IN, locally known as Okie Pinokie; taken while out in the Jeep. They closed this area later due to a murder/body dump and other illegal activities.



And people on the MTB forum don't understand why I carry a pistol while out on the bike.

 

[BE Mike]

Not really woods but the day after corn harvest last fall a camp of several homeless guys was brought into plain view. This was 150 yards from the SIL house. The Sheriffs department was called to run the guys off. Dates on the food wrappers left behind showed they had been there a couple months.

I never knew that homeless folks wouldn't eat food after the expiration date!

 

[tscherry70]

Scariest? That would be in the remote Idaho wilderness at night and finding a mountain lion's eye shine with your mag light watching your every move about 100 ft away. I wasn't armed and never heard it. But I'll never forget the feeling of dread wash over me.

Second place would be coming face to face with a giant bull Elk while scouting around Nez Perce national forest on an ATV. I wasn't armed and I just stopped to see what it would do. I was close enough (30 ft) to see it drooling and scratching its hove on the ground. A moment later, about 20 doe elk ran behind the bull and up the hill. He then chased them and allowed me to continue.

 

[Vanderbilt]

My encounter with Bigfoot in the Laketon Bog. During the annual Bigfoot ATV Festival every year. View attachment 278252

....gotta be careful down here in Brown County!

 

[Kalashalite]

It has been a while since any of our fellow wood walkers have posted any harrowing tales. Anyone care to add to the pile? I'll start...


During my high school spring break in 2012 when I was a Junior, me and 3 other close friends went on a trip to Brookville Indiana area. My best friends grandma and grandpa lived in a holler around there. So being in a holler, the back yard is one big steep hill. The hill is basically all this tall grass and locust trees until the top where there is a proper forest.

There's actually an 18th/19th century family graveyard up this hill but that's beside the point. (Creepy place to visit)

So after an afternoon of shooting followed by gun cleaning, followed by a few underaged adult beverages... we were standing around the burn barrel facing the hill. It was about 9PM and the sky was very clear so we were all looking at the stars as we talked and smoked hand rolled pipe tobacco cigarettes.

I was the first to notice a bright light in the sky above the canopy. The light was much bigger than that of any aircraft lights and it undulated between a few colors, orange, green and blue. This thing first went in a straight line and then it danced up and down in a gravity defying fashion above the treeline. The way I describe it is like those old sing-a-long-song tapes I saw as a kid where the lyrics are displayed on the bottom of the screen and a ball bobs up and down on each syllable. Picture the way a bouncy ball bounces up and down as it rolls. It seemed relatively high altitude, maybe the same altitude that I see jets approaching to land at Cincy/KY when I'm in Ripley county. What it honestly reminds me of in hindsight is a TOW wire guided missile, only being aimed around eratically and going wild, instead of holding the optic on a far target and keeping it very steady.

It made no noise, left no streak in the sky and and it zoomed over the horizon in the blink of an eye. Then about 15 minutes later, we noticed the even weirder thing.... Jets. 3-5 Jets. They were flying in different directions but they seemed to be military judging by the fact that they lacked any normal blinking lights that we're used to seeing on jetliners. They were single engine with the only thing visible being the afterburner and streaks.

So basically in a nutshell we saw a very unusual bright light that displayed unconventional maneuvers, followed buy multiple military jets that seemed to be scanning the area.

Hopefully an Air Force member or Air National Guardsman will see this and tell me what the hell we saw, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. I think it was something strange.



(I hope you don't mind the bump)

 

[ghuns]

...as we talked and smoked hand rolled pipe tobacco cigarettes...

 

[Kalashalite]

We could barely afford .22 ammo let alone drugs lol. But I like the sentiment.

 

[Michigan Slim]

I was at my place in Michigan cutting firewood on the edge of a piece of the Manistee national forest. Deer flies and skeeters were thick. I shut down the saw to haul wood to the truck and saw a guy running through the woods out of the swamp on federal land. All he was wearing was muddy blue underwear. What the hell that was all about I have no idea, but it creeped me out. Glad I'm always armed!

 

[DoggyDaddy]

I was at my place in Michigan cutting firewood on the edge of a piece of the Manistee national forest. Deer flies and skeeters were thick. I shut down the saw to haul wood to the truck and saw a guy running through the woods out of the swamp on federal land. All he was wearing was muddy blue underwear. What the hell that was all about I have no idea, but it creeped me out. Glad I'm always armed!

You sure it was "muddy"? Maybe he was having an "emergency".

 

[Michigan Slim]

You sure it was "muddy"? Maybe he was having an "emergency".

He was muddy too.
My nearest neighbor is a mile away and he was headed toward the deep woods. I didn't hear banjos so

 

[Max Volume]

I was at my place in Michigan cutting firewood on the edge of a piece of the Manistee national forest. Deer flies and skeeters were thick. I shut down the saw to haul wood to the truck and saw a guy running through the woods out of the swamp on federal land. All he was wearing was muddy blue underwear. What the hell that was all about I have no idea, but it creeped me out. Glad I'm always armed!

 

[johntheplinker]

Here is the “Goosetown“ tale.

A young man just recounted a story from this years deer season about a haint.
He was hunting on Goosetown ridge in a tree stand and heard a wagon and horse team bouncing down a old trail that runs along the top of the ridge.
According to him you could hear the horses snorting, the rattle of the bits, the wheels squeaking? He heard this on two occasions just before day light the old trail hasn’t been in use for over 100 years and has deep ruts from wagons still visible.

Was shooting the bull today with one of the customers, he lives just down and on the other side of the road from me. Hasn't lived out here but a couple of years. His place butts up against Goosetown ridge. He said he'd seen odd looking lights up there several times, looked like they were just floating around so I told him about some of the things I've heard. Said he had heard some of the same from others.