Creepy experiences in the backcountry

Love this thread. I have one from this fall that got my Adrenalin pumping.

I drew a limited elk tag in western WA near Seattle. Our camp consisted of a 14x16 Davis wall tent for cooking and relaxing next to the wood stove as well as our 7x14 cargo trailer for sleeping in. We had staged the trailer perpendicular to the entry/awning of the tent to create a breezeway between the two shelters. It was a good place to camp due to being central for the unit, low in elevation when the snow would hit but it was just off a rural highway that served as a main artery into the greater Tacoma/Seattle area. Over the course of scouting and hunting this area, we have encountered several transient camps, people that appear to be hiding out/living in their car, burnt up cars….you get the picture. We’ve never had a real issue but know the potential exists.

Second night in camp, about 1 am, I awoke to the subtle but unmistakable sounds of someone moving around our camp. I laid in my cot straining to listen and confirm. I could hear the occasional scuffing of a step, the crinkling of the awning sidewalls and general sounds of quiet rifling of gear around the entry to our tent. Then I heard the undeniable creaking of our cooler lid opening and closing a couple times.

I got out of bed quietly and made my way to the cargo trailer door, unlocked it and paused. The noises were ongoing outside, potentially only several feet away from me so I knew that I still had the element of surprise on my side. My rifle was in the trailer, in its latched gun case and ammo clip loose inside the case as well. I had tiptoed out of my cot without my headlamp and was blind to fumble for my rifle in the trailer. F@#$!!!! I thought, I had allowed myself to not be prepared for this moment. My dad and best friend were still sound asleep in their cots and my dad’s sidearm location was UTL. I didn’t want to create a ruckus in the trailer and allow whoever was outside to prepare for my next move.

Very dumb in hindsight but in that moment of holding the trailer door latch, Adrenalin pumping and boiling with anger at having someone currently going through our stuff, I flung the door open and let out a guttural “hey!!!”. As the door crashed open, before I could take a step out, a dark blob sprinted between me and the tent. I ducked my head back in the doorway instinctively. I leaned back out and about 20 yards away, in the moonlight, could see a black bear standing broadside and looking back at me. In my “fight” stage, I yelled agin at the bear and it finally lumbered off into the darkness.

Relieved that it was only a bear and not a band of tweakers to contend with, my dad had slept through the whole ordeal and my buddy finally rolled over in his bed to ask what was happening? 😂

Next morning, we found muddy bear paw prints on top of both coolers and a Costco tray of cheese on the ground that had been pulled out of the cooler. I was thankful that my marinating, antelope backstrap was at the bottom of the cooler and had not been scavenged. 😊

Probably not the first offense by that bear but in all my years sleeping in the woods, I’ve never had a bear cause a problem. Mice and curious cattle have been the usual suspects. We laugh about it now but in that moment, my heart was racing and mind bracing for the unknown.

My takeaway from that experience was to always keep a headlamp and sidearm ready next to my cot. Better to not need either than to be in the predicament I found myself in. In hindsight it would have probably been smarter to actually let the “intruders” hear the sound me chambering a round in my 300WSM before flinging the door open and if nothing else, I would have actually had a gun in my hand to deal with whatever issue at hand. Thankful it was only Yogi this time.
 
I know others have mentioned this but I got to hunt whitetails out of a treestand for the first time this weekend in the Bitterroot Valley.
I was following my online tracker in the dark(windy, blowing 20, gusting 30) at 6:00 AM when I got slightly off course and retraced my steps to the correct side of a stand of olives when I heard the most violent crashing in the side of the scrub I was just standing on a minute ago.
My first thought was bear crashing through the brush but quickly realized a tree came down right where I was standing a minute earlier.
It took me a while to get over that adrenaline rush but I got another adrenaline jolt when I killed a decent buck with my bow a couple hours later.
 
ripcurlksm said:
Portal

Back in the mid 70s after I transferred from active USMC to USMCR and went to college, I was home for a summer because I couldn't find summer work near the college and got on at a job I had back in high school working for a local logger. Not all the tandems and tri-axle log trucks had Prentice loading booms, and the GMC I was driving was one without, so as I waited for the truck to get loaded at a staging yard at the start of some skidder trails, I walked off into the woods to ah, urinate and kill some time. I was walking along a game trail within sight of the loader, my truck, and the staging yard but still in the woods deep enough that I really couldn't make out any of the equipment behind me.

There are some pretty large conglomerate rock boulders in north central PA, as big as houses in some areas and on some hillsides. The game trail went between two such large conglomerate boulders, both were perhaps 10 or 12 ft tall, taller than a standard room ceiling. I walked past the boulders maybe eight or 10 yards and the temperature in the woods IMMEDIATELY felt like it dropped 20 degrees as I took two more steps. The hair stood up on my neck and my skin was a mess of goose bumps. There was a faint buzzing, crackling sound like arc welding, and an oily odor something like oil or coal burning, but no smoke that I could see. Maybe like when a fluorescent ballast gives out, but without the burning electrical smell. Hard to describe.

I slammed the brakes on right there, hair standing on edge, heart pounding, with the reptile part of my brain screaming, "RUN!" I took a couple sliding steps backward, listening to the faint buzzing / crackling noise that sounded a bit like an ongoing electrical short, or arc welding.

I was looking forward all around, through the 180 degrees of vision, and caught movement to the left of center, about 20-25 yards ahead at my 11 o'clock. The woods in that area was blurry, almost shimmering like heat off a car hood or blacktop in August, but the blurriness was a section of woods about 12-15 feet wide and maybe just as tall or taller, I'm guessing, in relation to the conglomerate rock boulders. I stood there for maybe 30 seconds, maybe five minutes, I don't know. The patch of woods at my 11 o'clock continued to waver and shimmer slightly, and the buzz and odor didn't let up. I knew I did NOT want to go near that spot of woods. There were no animal noises whatsover. I think I probably could have moved if I wanted to, but something deep within me said to hold fast.

After the 30 seconds (or five minutes) passed the buzz started to fade fairly noticeably, and the blurry shimmery effect seemed to fade with it. When the noise was gone, the woods at 11 o'clock looked just like the rest of the woods in front of me. The woods felt warmer. The gooseflesh feeling went away.

I backed up slowly till I got to the rocks, then backed past them before turning and walking quickly back to the staging yard. The loader operator had four or five more logs to load and I just climbed into the GMC's cab and sat behind the wheel. I wasn't there five seconds and I started to shake uncontrollably. I sat there shaking until the loader hit the horn, signalling me to pull ahead and chain up the load. I about fell out of the truck and started laying out the load chains, but concentrating on the work sorta got me straightened out and the shaking went away. I felt wasted, like after a 20 mile hike with a full ALICE pack, ammo load, two canteens, and M16A1.

I didn't say anything to anyone until about six or eight years ago when I was in a gun shop and some regulars were swapping hunting stories. One of the guys related a story that was identical to my experience. Different location in north central PA woods, but there was no doubt in my mind he saw the same thing I did. None of the guys razzed him, and I said "I saw that too, back in the summer of 1975." One of the other guys said his deceased father told him about seeing the same effect decades earlier.
Click to expand...
What county in north central PA?
 
Had an odd experience in the GWNF adjacent to Ramsey’s Draft while deer hunting a few years back. My son and I hiked back on an old, well worn trail for an end of the day sit . We planned to come out in the dark, with me being further down the trail. I told him to sit tight and wait for me to pick him up on my way back, and to keep an eye out for my headlamp. I settled in and tuned into the creepy Appalachian dusk when I saw a small, perfectly round “circle” next to a tree about 15’ above the ground. It was transparent but the sky that I could see clearly through it was distinctly a lighter, more yellow shade than the the rest of the gloomy onset of evening. I had binos in my daypack but I knew that I’d make too much noise fishing them out so I attempted to look at it through my riflescope but I couldn’t see it under magnification. I dialed the scope down to 2 power, oriented the muzzle on the orb, could clearly see the lighter sky through it, but couldn’t see it with my scope. I waited until full darkness, watching the yellow light fade slowly before it disappeared. We were in a thick, narrow drainage and I have wracked my brain trying to account for what I saw but I’ve got nothing.
 
I'm reading through this entire thread. Still have 40 pages to go, I'm addicted...

I was telling my dad about some of the stories and he says, I have one. He was driving some logging roads on private timber checking out some cuts and looking for deer on a summer scout(back before every gate was locked). He said a pickup comes up on his ass and then flys past him on a wide corner. The truck then whips it sideways in the road and another noses up behind him. He had a 22 pistol but otherwise wasn't well armed. He said he spun a 180, spraying gravel, dropped into the ditch and had enough room to get around the rig behind him rallying through the ditch. Pedal to the medal and never looked back. Said he didn't know what they wanted or planned to do and he didn't intend to find out..
 
Graybush said:
Had an odd experience in the GWNF adjacent to Ramsey’s Draft while deer hunting a few years back. My son and I hiked back on an old, well worn trail for an end of the day sit . We planned to come out in the dark, with me being further down the trail. I told him to sit tight and wait for me to pick him up on my way back, and to keep an eye out for my headlamp. I settled in and tuned into the creepy Appalachian dusk when I saw a small, perfectly round “circle” next to a tree about 15’ above the ground. It was transparent but the sky that I could see clearly through it was distinctly a lighter, more yellow shade than the the rest of the gloomy onset of evening. I had binos in my daypack but I knew that I’d make too much noise fishing them out so I attempted to look at it through my riflescope but I couldn’t see it under magnification. I dialed the scope down to 2 power, oriented the muzzle on the orb, could clearly see the lighter sky through it, but couldn’t see it with my scope. I waited until full darkness, watching the yellow light fade slowly before it disappeared. We were in a thick, narrow drainage and I have wracked my brain trying to account for what I saw but I’ve got nothing.
Click to expand...
Bit of spider silk right in your eyeball
 
One time in November on a late muzzleoader elk hunt, I ended up several miles from the nearest trailhead attempting a stalk on a bull. Ran out of daylight. I was cruising back down the mountainside, trying to find the way I had taken up. It was pretty thick timber, I was fighting my way through and ended up in a good size meadow, maybe 200 yards across. I stopped to take a break and look at my maps on where I was. It was an absolute pitch black night out, approaching 11 pm or so with still atleast a mile to the trail. I happened to catch what looked like an eye shine across the meadow in my headlamp. I turned my headlamp up, and got a better view and felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It looked to be about 6 feet tall, staring straight at me upright. I sat down with my muzzleoader and pulled out my binos. Carefully lined up my light and binos to get a better look, and all I could see was the outline of a man in a coat, with two beady green eyes staring back at me. I yelled out “hello!” with nothing in return. I really started to get freaked out, as someone whose spent plenty of time in the dark alone, the only things that have ever came across my mind as spooky was perhaps being followed by a mountain lion. Seeing what looks to be a person, where there should not be anyone was really getting to me. Especially now with no response, and why the hell are its eyes glowing?? I proceeded to make noise, and finally started cruising across the meadow, a little closer to it but mostly trying to get into the other side closer to the trail. I kept my headlamp on it, and spun a few circles now concerned it wasn’t the only one. Heard something behind me, flashed the light around to see nothing. I got the light back over on the figure, and the eyes and its head were gone.
I sat there just still trying to absorb what was going on. I got my binos back on it and could definitely make out a man’s coat. I decided to get closer. I could then make out a fencepost. Locked onto what I was seeing, and still confused, I saw an owl come and land on top of the coat. Some asshole draped an old trenchcoat on top of a fencepost, and a freaking owl was sitting on top of it hunting mice in the meadow. I was so relieved but god damn that was some of the spookiest shit in the moment I’d ever come across.
 
This one isn’t mine but in 99 my dad was up in the Yukon hunting sheep with his best friend, they had both killed their rams by day 6 out of 10, anyway they were only a few miles from the NWT border so extremely remote country on both sides of the border and were waiting for the float plane to come pick them up and the guides would lead the horses back to base.
It was the end of August and getting dark enough they would watch the northern lights. That first night after they had both killed their rams they were down at a lake that had an old trapper cabin that they were told hadn’t been inhabited since at least the 30s my dad had found a cast iron pan in there and cleaned it up and used it to cook some tender loin. That night the pan disappeared. Then the next day 3 potatoes and a small propane bottle were gone from the pack horse panniers. The second to last night before the plane was due in the northern lights we’re going intense and as my dad, his friend & the guides were drinking whiskey around the fire he said they could hear a woman screaming something down the canyon away from them. My dad swears that all 4 of them had heard the same thing and no one in the group had messed with the spuds, pan or propane and both guides had acknowledged that there was far too much wilderness in any direction for anyone else to get in there with out horses or a plane.
My dad is not the superstitious type & still jokes that the ghost stole his favorite trophy from that hunt.
 
Mid 90’s in junior high, my best friend and I are calling coyotes on a perfect January night, northeast Nebraska. Full moon, 5” snow on bean stubble, dead still. We were sitting in the snow on a shallow knob by the pivot point, back to back. I was occassionally blowing on my dying rabbit call, when I heard an quiet “whooshing” sound off to my right. I looked up just in time to see a face full of talons 16” from my head and an owl trying to do full reverse thrust as it realized that I was not a dying cottontail.
 
jscore said:
Mid 90’s in junior high, my best friend and I are calling coyotes on a perfect January night, northeast Nebraska. Full moon, 5” snow on bean stubble, dead still. We were sitting in the snow on a shallow knob by the pivot point, back to back. I was occassionally blowing on my dying rabbit call, when I heard a quiet “whooshing” sound off to my right. I looked up just in time to see a face full of talons 16” from my head and an owl trying to do full reverse thrust as it realized that I was not a dying cottontail.
Click to expand...
Been there done that too! Only the owl knocked my buddy’s cap off.
 
jscore said:
Mid 90’s in junior high, my best friend and I are calling coyotes on a perfect January night, northeast Nebraska. Full moon, 5” snow on bean stubble, dead still. We were sitting in the snow on a shallow knob by the pivot point, back to back. I was occassionally blowing on my dying rabbit call, when I heard an quiet “whooshing” sound off to my right. I looked up just in time to see a face full of talons 16” from my head and an owl trying to do full reverse thrust as it realized that I was not a dying cottontail.
Click to expand...

This reminded me of a true story I read years ago about a lone guy walking through the woods, wearing a coon skin hat (or something like that), and a bird of prey swooped down and nailed him, severing a large vessel in his neck (jugular or probably carotid, I can’t remember), and he bled out and died. I can’t remember the details, but they surmised from his wounds and the birds that inhabited that area of the country, that it was a great horned owl.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
If you're going to bump this thread you better be adding a creepy story. Don't just bump it hoping for spooky handouts. I'm tired of seeing this thread near the top without new material.

In order to not be a hypocrite I'll add a story from a long time ago, May of 2003 I believe . I can't remember what my two idiot friends and I were trying to accomplish that day but we attempted to hike into the backcountry and it was one of those days where we made it a few miles just walking on top of the snow drifts but once it warmed up we were post-holing and it became a bad scenario for teenagers wearing skate shoes or whatever and generally being unprepared. Instead of going back the way we came due to our predicament we decided to drop straight downhill to get out of the deeper snow and just planned to hitchhike back to the car from whatever road we came to first. Great plan! After slogging down this steep north facing mountain for at least an hour or two we unexpectedly ended up at an old cabin on the edge of the wilderness which we were not expecting. I've since looked at the map on my onx and this is literally the only dwelling within many miles and seems to be a private inholding that pre-dates the wilderness designation. I remember hoping that it was an unoccupied summer cabin but we saw smoke coming from the chimney and knew someone was home and we were suddenly aware that we were trespassing. The road leading to the cabin was unplowed with no vehicle tracks leading in or out which we all though was strange given the isolated location. I remember some type of quick discussion taking place amongst us. Something akin to "hey let's get the hell out of here". As we start walking down the road out of nowhere is just this old man with a long white beard wearing a tattered grey robe and carrying what I can best describe as a long sicle like the grim reaper carries. For a minute we all thought we were about to be murdered. Turns out the guy lived on his own up there and didn't own a vehicle. He said he rides his bike into town once every couple of weeks during the summer and stocks up on supplies for winter. He said we were the first people he had seen or talked to since November (it was early May). We apologized for trespassing but he clearly didn't care. It took us several hours of walking down his road and then finally getting a ride from someone back to our car. Looking back on this I actually really admire the guy. He's probably passed away by now but there can't be too many people left like him living alone at 10,000 ft all winter.
 
Nickofthewoods said:
Looking back on this I actually really admire the guy. He's probably passed away by now but there can't be too many people left like him living alone at 10,000 ft all winter.
Click to expand...

I work in healthcare and had a patient that lived above 9000 feet all by herself in the mountains of Montana. Wood heat, no electric or plumbing. She was in her 60’s when I met her in the hospital due to low oxygen and COPD. One of the toughest women I’ve ever met. We discussed the risks of going back to her mountain home with COPD and low oxygen and she said she’d rather die up there than live in the city connected to an oxygen tank. Can’t say I blame her.

She lived in her cabin and rarely saw annyone else from roughly October - May every year due to getting snowed in. In the winter months, I would coordinate her prescription pick up with her neighbor who would then bring her inhalers and medications to her by snowmobile. In the later years she would spend her winters in town with a friend but always went back to her cabin as soon as the snow melted.
 
A weird shrine in a spot no one would ever go, no memorial.
Bear running right under my feet from a den, holly crap.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

C
The Federal Ammo announcement
Replies
3
Views
764
MuleyFever
MuleyFever
B
Frank Church Air taxi
Replies
15
Views
1K
one66stang
O
Iowafarmer
NRA Whittington center hunting
Replies
1
Views
424
wyosteve
W
T
Digital Camera for backcountry hunt?
Replies
3
Views
617
Goseth04
G
R
Christensen 7mm PRC Advice
Replies
15
Views
405
Long84
Long84

Latest posts

Featured Video

Latest Articles

Back
Top