Creepy experiences in the backcountry

Mojave Kid said:
My first post on Rok Slide. About 10 yrs ago, I took my brother and friend with my 2 dogs quail hunting and found a trail leading from the desert up into a feeder canyon in the southern Sierra Nevada. I parked the truck at the trail head and there were a couple of run down abandoned cabins on either side of the trail. We were all strapped with handguns and we announced ourselves and approached the cabins, one of them had a real cool old attachment shack made of rocks against the slope of the hill. None of us got any bad vibes and the dogs were fine so we split up and started hunting. Now at one point I started chasing a covey away from the cabins in the direction that we came and I noticed in my peripheral vision a man with crossed arms off my left about 40 yds away and when I did a double take all I saw was a Joshua tree in that same spot so I kept after me dogs and birds and I again felt someone looking at me from a different spot but on the same side of the mountain and again when I turned it was a Joshua Tree. The real strange thing is that later that morning I went hunting past the cabins into the canyon and my brother was on the slope about 150 feet above me looking for chukar . He later told me that when he saw me by the creek thicket below him a grey mist/cloud moved down the canyon and went over me and my dogs between him and me and he said that made him feel real uneasy. Nothing else happened on the trip, but if I believed in ghosts I would say that some miner is guarding his stash up there. I have tried to go back to that spot over the years but the wife and kids get mad and have said that I'm going to bring back some bad mojo if I go so I let it be. Every summer on the way to Bishop, I look off towards the Sierras and see the haunted canyon far off in the distance.
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Id be curious to know where this is! I drive up the 395 every year and always love finding out new/historical/interesting spots!
 
Ditt44 said:
Not back country but definitely 'backward country'. I grew up in southwestern PA, Greene County, a few air miles from the WV border so, at least we weren't "in" WV.

Early November 1984. One Saturday my friend calls me and says "get over here, I found a ton of grouse!". My mom drops me off and we start hunting his neighbor's property, with permission. We flushed nearly 20 grouse in an hour. Shot one each. Most of these were bumping some of the same birds, I'm sure but they were everywhere. I did not hunt with my dog that day as mom wouldn't allow her in the car.

One week later my uncle and his friend come out, as they always do, to hunt our property. I convince them to go over to the place from last week. I call, get permission, and off we go. We pile out of the truck with my English Setter and my uncle's Brittany. This is old growth woods, mostly oak and other mixed hardwoods, mature trees with grape vine tangles all over the place, old dead falls etc. We are pushing out the north side of a long spur ridge than runs about a 3/4 of a mile in length. The plan is to get to an old gas well out on the point of the ridge and loop around the south side back to the truck.

We pushed probably half of the way out the ridge, flushed a couple birds and had a few tough shots. Suddenly there is a rile shot, clearly fired in our direction. We continue forward not really thinking much of it until a second shot and then the impact of a bullet on a tree, between my uncle and I. My uncle yells out and another shot follows, another tree hit, bark flying. We can't see anything. We all yell again. Another shot and a bullet goes whizzing over my head.

At that, we call in the dogs and back out and up to the top of the ridge. Pretty pissed but realizing a couple 12 gauges loaded with 6-shot are not going to match up to a rifle very well. We get over the ridge and start down the other slope and back toward the truck. There is a rough service road that goes out along the top of the ridge to the well head. We were a good 75 yards down the south slope and moving when we hear a vehicle. Off come the orange vests and hats and called back the dogs quickly, leashed them and I for one was all but laying on my girl as she was 90% white. I was behind a huge old oak but it felt awful small when the black van stopped directly above us. Out comes a guy with a rifle in his hands... he walks over and stands there, looking down the hillside in our direction. Probably 75 yards away. After what felt like an eternity, he slowly walks to the rear of the van looking our way and then gets in and slowly drives away.

We waited awhile then slowly worked our way back to the truck with vests and hats tucked inside our jackets, dogs leashed. We got out of there OK and back to the house. I called the local state game officer as he lived only two miles away and was good friends with our family. He forwarded the information to the state police. They never found the van. That was a very terrifying experience realizing that you could do nothing if confronted, never saw the shooter until he got out of the van and even at that distance, we were powerless.

Since that day I never leave the house with just bird shot. I take five slugs with me any time I go out with "just" a shotgun.
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No way of knowing if it is related but that is in reasonable geographic and chronological proximity to the murders committed by Thomas Dillon.

en.m.wikipedia.org

Thomas Dillon - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
Surely we aren’t at the end of the good creepy backcountry story rope, are we??? Only 75 pages???? I’m thinking we can improve on this… this is a safe place, folks. Let’s air it out!
 
505Wapiti said:
Surely we aren’t at the end of the good creepy backcountry story rope, are we??? Only 75 pages???? I’m thinking we can improve on this… this is a safe place, folks. Let’s air it out!
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I opened this thread expecting to see the Pahaska Sasquatch story.

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Here's mine, not nearly as scary now that I think about it, but at the time (20 years ago, pre-cell phone) I was not too thrilled. Back in the sticks of VA when I was 13-14 my dad dropped me off at our lease property so I could get the afternoon hunt in. The plan was to pick me up once the sun set. I get my gear, safety orange, etc and head off to the stand about 1/2 mile in. As I was walking I hear some other leaves crunching and after a bit I finally see what it is, another dude dressed in camo, no orange, clearly trespassing. I had never seen him before and I knew all the members of the club at the time. He stops to talk, asks me where I'm going, strange to see a kid out here alone, etc. I didnt know what to do since I wasnt about to tell this wierd dude off. So I told him I was going to meet my dad at the end of the trail, that seemed to get him a little spooked and he went on his way. I immediately loaded my shotgun at that point and went back to sit closer to the trailhead and wait for my dad to get back. Didnt see the guy again fortunately, but was thoroughly creeped out by the interaction.

Honestly it's the main reason I still pack a sidearm nearly anytime I head into the woods. I'll take the weight penalty any day of the week to keep the two legged threats at bay.
 
There was a hike to fish a lake 6 miles in from the trailhead….it was dark really dark on the return. We were really tired. 1/2 mile from the trailhead a bearded little person in a black karate gee appears - no shoes, no flashlight - wtf?! Mentally he wasn’t all there and asked if we knew where the trailhead was - the lights of a few campers were clear as day behind him if he had just turned around - mushrooms? Mental? Hidden camera joke?

Weirdest f’n thing I’ve seen to this day!
 
wavygravy said:
Here's mine, not nearly as scary now that I think about it, but at the time (20 years ago, pre-cell phone) I was not too thrilled. Back in the sticks of VA when I was 13-14 my dad dropped me off at our lease property so I could get the afternoon hunt in. The plan was to pick me up once the sun set. I get my gear, safety orange, etc and head off to the stand about 1/2 mile in. As I was walking I hear some other leaves crunching and after a bit I finally see what it is, another dude dressed in camo, no orange, clearly trespassing. I had never seen him before and I knew all the members of the club at the time. He stops to talk, asks me where I'm going, strange to see a kid out here alone, etc. I didnt know what to do since I wasnt about to tell this wierd dude off. So I told him I was going to meet my dad at the end of the trail, that seemed to get him a little spooked and he went on his way. I immediately loaded my shotgun at that point and went back to sit closer to the trailhead and wait for my dad to get back. Didnt see the guy again fortunately, but was thoroughly creeped out by the interaction.

Honestly it's the main reason I still pack a sidearm nearly anytime I head into the woods. I'll take the weight penalty any day of the week to keep the two legged threats at bay.
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Ran into a trespasser on family land when I was about the same age and I’m still freaked out about it. Something about when you’re that age by yourself and a grown man tries to intimidate you when they’re in the wrong that still hasn’t sat right with me.


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Schaefer18 said:
Once on the side of a mountain I was climbing I came upon
I found a duffle bag full of little kids clothes buried under a pile of shale on the side of a mountain. Literally in the middle of nowhere, kinda wierded me out, put everything back the way I found it and kept moving.
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I realize this was probably 20 years ago, but you gotta think that might have been evidence of something unseemly. Did you ever report it to the police? I know it isn't like finding a skull with a bullet hole but it's hard to come up with a innocent explanation. PS...my adult daughter insisted I reply. She was creeped out.
 
WoodnotRust said:
I realize this was probably 20 years ago, but you gotta think that might have been evidence of something unseemly. Did you ever report it to the police? I know it isn't like finding a skull with a bullet hole but it's hard to come up with a innocent explanation. PS...my adult daughter insisted I reply. She was creeped out.
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Yes, it certainly seems like a creepy find to me.
 
The Devil's Trout

It was summer 2004. The three of us, lifelong friends, arrived at our usual campsite in the Routt National Forest and commenced our annual ritual of camping, fishing, beer drinking, and story telling. The fishing in the lake was slow. We had been at it for several hours without so much as a bite. The next day was more of the same. Not even a bite in nearly 12 hours of fishing. It was nearing the end of the day and futility was setting in when Roy claimed there were no fish in the lake. I joked that maybe if he were to sell his soul to the devil he might catch one. Accepting my challenge, Roy began exclaiming...

"Ok devil. I hereby sell you my soul should I catch but one measly fish."

At that exact moment his line went taught and he caught a 10 inch long rainbow trout. Much fun was made of his new predicament, having sold his soul to the devil for such a small fish.

"Should have bargained for a 20 incher"

Said Tony.

Nightfall was now upon us and with a good fire full of hot coals the gutted trout would not be wasted. It was affixed to a whittled green pine bow and set over the hot coals. After awhile the edges of the trout skin began peeling back from the heat and the cooked white flesh was ready for consumption. We took turns sampling the delicious flakey meat and commenced bonding over the crackling flames. Not long after the clock struck midnight we all retired to our sleeping bags in the tent with heavy eyelids. All was well until about 2am when I awoke with the sickening urge to immediately vomit. I barely got out of my bag and opened the tent zipper when I violently puked the entire contents of my stomach. About one minute into my situation I hear a sleeping bag rustling behind me and the muffled voice of Roy as he struggled to exit his bag and find the tent flap. He wasn't as lucky as I was, and barfed explosively inside the tent. The commotion had awoken Tony and though it is still unknown whether he vomited as a result of Roy vomiting on him, he still suffered the same fate as us, hurling chunks uncontrollably. This all unfolded in under 5 minutes, leaving us mortified, disgusted, and confused. It was a long night afterwards to say the least.

The moral of this story should be obvious. No matter how slow the fishing is, be sure to keep one's soul intact.
 
3forks said:
Just like one of my personal favorites, Rainier beer.

Rainiers can be made to sound classier and more acceptable to micro brew snobs by pronouncing them with a French twist as “Ron-yays”, instead of ”Ruh-neers”.
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In our household we do the same thing when it comes to occasionally going to Target.

We have fun pronouncing it like a French word : Sorta like "Tar-shay" but the "shay" has that preceding French "j" ("zsh") kinda sound to it! (hehe)
 
Gooseby said:
I got one for you guys. Been lurking these forums for a few months now I figure I should contribute.

This story takes place during a rafting trip on the deschutes river in central Oregon. My girlfriend and I had decided to drive down from the Seattle area for the famous salmonfly hatch.
With that being said, due to the timing of the year there’s a ton of people on the water. Guides doing day trips, as well as other folks like my girlfriend and I spending a couple days fishing, floating, and camping.
Our first day of the trip goes by pretty poorly. I had a crappy boat and no idea what I was doing. Dry bags leaked, I hit a rock and got us a sizeable leak and then had forgotten the bucket so I spent the rest of the trip bailing out the boat with a water bottle non stop. So needless to say, we’re both pretty frustrated and tired and as the day turns to dusk we’re scouting out any possible spot to throw our tent up for the evening and get out of that crappy boat.
Finally things are looking up for us - we come up on this beautiful stretch of water with a small island diverting the river into two flows, with the main flow going along the deep left channel at a pretty good clip. On the right side bank a big clearing surrounded by tall grasses. This is where we chose to make camp for the night.
We do some fishing, cook, and decide to lay down for bed and read until it’s time to really go to sleep at full dark. Going out to take a leak nobody as far as I could see or hear had decided to camp anywhere near us, and prior to a few boats floating on by while we set up camp as far as we knew, we were alone.
That’s when the music started. At first it sounded almost faintly like someone was throwing a rave, with dance music and the like. My girlfriend and I looked at each other like “what the hell?” but we chocked it up to the wind carrying sound from far away because at this point the music was still intermittent.
It gets louder. and louder. And now we can make out the music except it’s not. You know that feeling when someone is blasting the bass out of their car subwoofers and you can feel it in your chest, and in your head? We’re feeling their, whoever they are, music through the ground as we’re trying to sleep. and all we can hear is this unworldly, jarring, collection of disjointed bass / drum notes coming through the ground. It doesn’t resemble any music I’ve ever heard, or even any sort of “beat” you could dance to.
By midnight or 1am we’re starting to getting really damn pissed off. It has been since around 10pm since they started and so that’s when I finally decide to go find whoever the hell they are and shut down that damn noise. I have one of those really powerful headlights that lets you output like 1500 lumens for a short burst and it really just lights up the whole damned countryside for hundreds of feet.
So all pissed off I jump out of the tent and turn up my headlight of doom and I’m just furiously scanning everywhere I can see. Up and down the river, behind us as far as I can on our own bank, across clear to the other bank, and the little island in the middle. And there’s not a single thing in sight. Complete pitch darkness. I turn off my headlight to see if I was washing out any light and I stand there for about 10 minutes to see if my eyes adjust and see anything. Absolutely nothing at all and this maddening noise is going on endlessly.
At this point I realize it’s the same three disjointed “songs” playing over and over endlessly. My girlfriend starts crying because she’s exhausted from the bass rattling our skulls while our heads on laying down on our pillows. We’re unable to sleep for hours as this thing continues on through the night.
Finally, sometime around 4:30- 5am it must have stopped and we both drifted off to sleep. I have a hard time sleeping in so I woke up by myself at around 6:30-7 and I roll out of bed furious, once more just going out to go see if I can find whatever bastards were making that noise all night long.
We never saw or found any sign of those people. we waited until about 9am slowly breaking camp after eating breakfast before we rowed out in the main current and back rowed to try to get a good look at the other side of the small island, and we saw no signs of people.
The only reasonable theory we have is that sometime after we went to bed, some folks floated down to the far side of the little island and threw some sort of… party? Ritual? All through the night and somehow slipped out between 4:30 and 6:30 AM. If I wasn’t with my girlfriend and she hadn’t corroborated as well I would’ve thought i was going insane. Just one long maddening sleepless night full of the same noise over and over, with no evidence before, during, or after that it ever happened.

I was eyeing every boat we passed or passed us for the remainder of the trip looking for anyone who was packing serious audio equipment and we saw nothing.
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TL,DR: I have experienced something similar, but different, and have come to suspect an underground natural gas pipeline as the culprit.

My wife and I moved to rural property two years ago. For two spring seasons now, I have been hearing rhythmic bass noises in the early morning, sometimes extending throughout the day. The closest noise comparison to what I hear is the sound of a small four-stroke motor trying to start for about one second, then stopping. Like when you are camping and someone starts up their quad on the other side of a hill, where you can just hear/feel the bass elements of the noise, with all the high-end starter/mechanical noise stripped away. The noise is more detectable by feel than my actual ears, and is quiet enough where any background noise makes it hard to pick up. It seems to come from the ground, and I definitely seem to hear it more often if I am near a geographical feature, like a deep terrace cut we made to level an area, an old outhouse, or our 4 foot utility trenches (when they were open). It can happen every 30 seconds, or it could happen once a day. I have since heard the same noise consistently on a small lake we kayak fish, when we are out on the water. Depending at where I am on the lake, the noise will sound like it comes from different compass directions. I also heard it once while hiking on a bench above a river that lies in a bit of a valley. If I plot these three points on a map, it makes a triangle with roughly 5-mile sides. At all three locations, the sound presents at the same "volume", meaning nowhere does it sound like the source is closer or further away.

My wife never hears noises that I hear, so the first year, I gave up trying to get her to hear it. This last spring, I got her to hear it at both our property and on the lake. Last year, my parents were with me when I heard it hiking by the river, and they heard it too.

I have been hearing about the so-called "worldwide hum" phenomenon for several years, so I began looking into that. What I found out is that the hum is sort of a catch-all for any environmental auditory phenomena that people experience. Most people that I read about experiencing it either hear a truck idling (kind of similar to mine) or a high-pitched whine. Unfortunately, with the decline of literacy you have a lot of people that are just incapable of describing what they hear, or even understanding what the words they use actually mean. Which is why there are people who hear what sounds like the bass rumble of a large engine idling and think of it as a "hum", kind of like people who think sour and bitter mean the same thing. I did read extensively about a college professor who has been running a study on the hum phenomenon for years. It seems like this professor come to the conclusion that the actual unidentified phenomenon is a higher-pitched hum that people hear that does not actually exist, and is possibly caused by some additive in sodas, with a huge percentage of people thinking that any unidentified noise they hear puts them in the hum club. So I ruled that out as what I was experiencing.

I also looked at industrial noise, which is the obvious answer. My area is mostly national forest, with no large quarrying or mining to speak of. This never seemed like the answer to me anyway, since the uniformity of the volume no matter where I hear it it is the same, and a sound from a pinpoint location like a quarry or mine would seem to diminish the further you get from it. Regardless, there are no operations like this within the triangle of where I hear the noise. We also have busy rail lines in the area. We can hear the train when it rolls through an area about 6 miles from us, but the mystery noise is nothing like the various noises that trains make.

What we also have in the area is a large natural gas pipeline that basically runs through the entire county from north to south. I have learned that these large gas lines need what is called a compressor station about every 50 miles because they have to constantly re-pressurize the gas to keep it moving. At this point, I think that this is the most likely source for the noise. I think because it runs the length of the county, it explains the uniform volume I hear. I don't fully understand how it can sound the same when I am 1/4 mile (the river spot) or 5 miles away (our property and the lake are both about 5 miles from the pipe), but I know that sound and vibration conducts strangely underground. The funny thing is that we lived less than a mile from one of the compressor stations, and about 100 yards from the actual pipeline for one winter and spring before we moved to this property, and I never heard the noise there.
 
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