My Second [scariest] Encounter with The Breather!

My second [scariest] encounter with The Breather!

After high school I moved to the west coast to attend college. A Native American Studies professor had taken me under his wing and had put me on "the vision quest path", a traditional way of learning in nature, from nature. I had the summer off from school, and I decided to go on a solo backpacking get-away to contemplate a few good books and get in tune with nature and myself. I didn't plan the traditional fasting and ritual, but was intent on just solo camping for a week - and planned to bring plenty of food.

I was going to hike into the mountains at a spot i had selected on the map that i knew no one ever got to - there was no road access or maintained trails. I just had to hike out the back roads from the little town in the coastal range where I stayed, and by bushwacking [hiking without trails] through a series of private timberlands for a day or two, I saw I could eventually reach a creek that was literally isolated from human civilization...exactly what I wanted.

I hiked through second growth Douglas Fir forestland for most of the first day, and there was enough tree canopy to block out undergrowth and make most of the hiking easy. After a full day's hiking I camped on a small knoll under the trees the first night, and had an uneventful evening.

I started out at dawn the second day and by 3 pm I came to a ridge that looked down into an isolated little valley with a gorgeous creek flowing through. This area had been logged back in the day, perhaps sometime between the 1930's and 1950's, and the Redwood stumps and downed logging scrap were enormous. It took a lot of log scrambling to make it down into the valley. The river itself had been clogged in places by this 50 year old logging slash, and at places cascaded over giant fallen Redwood logs, effectively making it impossible for salmon to migrate up the stream in my analysis.

I hiked upriver for an hour or two to the only clearing i could find in the dense and thick undergrowth along the creek. That was the first bad sign. All the vegitation was dead in only this one clearing. I said a few prayers to the four directions in the traditional way my Native American mentor had taught me. In his way of looking at things, nature was full of various spirits - good and bad. He often warned me to stay away from places with "bad spirits and bad power", but quite frankly I thought he was just superstitious. He said, "Always pray and introduce yourself anytime you camp in a new place. Be sure to ask the good things to come and the bad things to stay away". So that is what I did. That's when the first "weird" thing happened.

When i was saying my prayers and offerings, i said something about "...the salmon cant make it upstream anymore, I'll bet they used to run this stream by the thousands and the Indians could just grab them", and i heard a voice, loud, clear and angry ring out IN MY MIND and say, "They did!". I was startled, because I dont usually hear inner-voices like that. It sounded evil. I imagined it was some Native ancestor spirit and tried to get it to speak me, but i couldnt get any response. It was just a quick, 1 or 2 second event, and my intuition sensed nothing more, so I wrote it off as my imagination.

I organized the clearing and set up camp. I put up the tent, set up the fire ring and collected wood, etc., and i hung my food in a tree away from bears. I also took a piss at a few places around the outskirts of the clearing so any animals [bears] around would smell the scent and know I was there [so neither of us would get startled]. I then hiked back downstream and played around for the rest of the day until almost dark.

When i came back to camp it was mostly dark. I made some ramen noodles and crawled into my tent as the blackness settled in. This is when shiz began to melt down. First, for some reason i had a REALLY BAD FEELING. I don't mean just a little dark intuition either. I mean, I had a REALLY, REALLY BAD FEELING. The best way I can describe it is that it literally felt like something ugly was trying to push itself into my mind...something dark. I tried to calm my mind and meditate the "stress" away, but for some reason I had the crazy thought that if I let down my guard...if I relaxed my mind too much...or if I fell asleep, whatever ugly thing was pushing in at my consciousness was going to overtake my mind. Right then something hit the tent! It was like a big drop of water, or that is what it seemed like to me from the inside of the tent. I unzipped and looked outside...no rain, a cloudless, moonless night...there were no trees above the tent for condensing water to drip from, and there was no moisture on the outside of the tent. I couldn't figure out where the drop of water came from, so I crawled back inside the tent, and felt the same bad feeling...like someone was inside the tent with me...and they HATED ME. Again, something hit the outside of the tent, and again it seemed like a big drop of water from the inside. I stayed still. drop...drop...drop... a steady drip OR SOMETHING was hitting the outside of the tent. I stuck my head outside again. There was nothing dripping...only stars and a clear night. Nothing was hitting the tent. Again, I went back inside the tent...again something started hitting the outside of the tent. drip...drip...drip...


[out of space...CONTINUED IN NEXT POST - please do not post any comments until I finish the account of the event in the next post]

[CONTINUED]

I went outside the tent again. AGAIN no drips, and nothing was hitting the outside of the tent. For some reason, at this point i was terrified, and I mean TERRIFIED! It made no sense to me. I had camped out by myself plenty of times, and knew these mountains very well. Nature was literally my best friend. I had never felt scared even once while camping alone. But for some reason i was absolutely terrified, and i didnt know why. I was so scared, that i grabbed my little collapsible .22 rifle and decided to fire a few shots off to scare away any animals that were near camp. I was actually thinking, "If a deer walks by camp and breaks a stick i'll die of fright". So i rationalized that if I fired a couple shots, it would scare away any animals near camp, and then I could be sure a racoon or whatever didnt scare me to death before i fell asleep -- which is a crazy thought, because like i said, i usually enjoy camping alone. But I couldn't deny the causeless fear I was feeling...so I fired off a few shots into the dense tangle of scrubbrush willows that my tent backed up to.

That's when all hell started to break loose. It wasn't more than a ten seconds after I fired the shots that a BLOODCURDLING SCREAM rang out about 10-15 feet behind my tent in the same bushes. i can only describe it as a loud shrieking scream, that had a laughing, whooping sound to it. At the time i thought, "holy shiz! its a laughing hyena!," before i could even realize, "thats crazy because those are in Africa not in the pacific coastal range".

That screaming, laughing shriek lasted a good 5-6 seconds, and it literally sent chills down my spine. That thing was no more than 10-20 feet away behind the willow thicket, and it was LOUD! By loud, I mean it was louder than I could scream in my loudest voice. I realized that whatever this thing was, it was SHRIEKING/LAUGHING/WHOOPING at me AFTER I FIRED THE GUN! THIS THING WAS NOT AFRAID OF THE LOUD GUNSHOTS!

After the screaming hyena, i started to trust my fear. I waited silently for a few seconds after the howl, listening for any movement in the willow thicket, but it was silent. I fired three more shots directly into the ground inside the thicket, thinking I would hear the movement of the hyena or whatever it was, knowing nothing could move around in there without making noise... But the only response to my gunshots was silence.

i wasnt really thinking straight, because my fear was now inexplicably primal. Honestly, it is almost impossible to scare me usually, but I was experiencing an almost uncontrollable, primal fear. It was very, very dark out by this point, and putting rationality aside, i decided this campsite was a bad place, that there was some bad spirit here like my mentor had warned me about, and i had to get out.

Dear reader, if you want to understand the extent of my fear at this point, consider this...I was mentally ready to LEAVE my totally built up campsite, to hike alone into the forest away from camp at night, leaving the campfire, leaving my tent and gear behind...and THERE WAS NOWHERE TO GO! I was literally two days hike, without trails, from the nearest human being. AND I STILL DECIDED TO LEAVE CAMP and walk alone into the forest at night, that's how badly I wanted to get out of there.

So I grabbed my sleeping bag and tossed it over my shoulder, and grabbed my gun and held it in the other hand and just started walking out of camp, leaving my tent, food and gear behind. I didn't have a plan, but knew I had to get out of camp. I was two days hike from the nearest house, and unbelievably, I had forgotten to replace the batteries on my flashlight, which was dead. but I didn't care, I just started walking and feeling the deer trail with my feet because the forest canopy made everything too black to see.

before I started walking out of camp, I again fired a couple shots in the air because I really didn't want to meet the hyena thing while I was walking. Again I felt that if I came across even a deer I would die of fright, so I hoped the gunshots would scare away ANY animals. This is when things got scary. I wasn't more than 50 feet outside of camp when my feet lost the deer trail... Every few steps I would walk directly into a tree. I tried to calm myself, and moved in slow circles, bumping against trees in the darkness, until again my feet found the hardpacked ground of the deer trail between the grass. After 2-3 minutes I was still only about 50 feet outside of camp...and then the Breather came.

I honestly cannot describe the size of its breathing...THIS THING BREATHES BIG HUGE SLOW BREATHS.. there is no animal that can breathe that big. It was very close to me, maybe 5-10 yards away, but it was too dark to see. It was breathing BIG, slow and I don't even know if breathing can be described this way, but its breathing was "angry". I thought about firing a shot in its direction, but realized that the little gun I had couldn't kill anything that big. I have been very close to bears and deer - they breath quietly. This thing had to be the size of 4-5 bears by the sound of it. I kept the gun pointed in the direction of the impossibly huge breathing sound, and kept moving very slowly so I wouldn't lose the trail again, feeling the trail with my feet. The Breather continued breathing steadily and powerfully, AT ME! The thing was breathing AT ME!

I kept walking, inch by inch, foot by foot in the blackness, realizing that at this point if I let the fear get the best of me I would lose my sanity. The Breather followed right alongside me about 5-10 feet off the trail moving at exactly the same slow pace I was moving. I remembered from daytime that along the trail where the Breather was standing there was a dense thicket of thimbleberry and salaal. Nothing could walk through that, I thought. But the Breather was walking right through the middle of the thicket...the sound of breaking sticks as it slowly moved was maddening. The weirdest thing is, it made the sound of 1000s of breaking sticks as it moved. It made this HUGE, loud, steady breathing sound, and it made the sounds of sticks breaking...ALOT of sticks breaking... It literally seemed to make the sound of more sticks breaking than there were sticks there.

It followed me parallel to the deer trail and literally only a few feet away from me for about 4-5 minutes, which was only about 200-300 feet because I was going so slow, and it made the sound of breaking sticks and breathing the whole time. I kept the gun pointed at it [without firing] and concentrated on keeping my feet on the trail. I was sure if I lost the trail again I would go insane bumping into trees with this thing on me.

After about 5 minutes of this insane dance, I broke free from the dense overgrowth of the tree canopy and there was enough light to see the deer trail. It stopped following when I got out from under the darkness of the trees, and I could walk faster. I hiked for a mile or two [I was still two days from the nearest people] and dropped my sleeping bag in the deer trail and went to sleep. nothing bad happened after I left that place, and amazingly I was able to fall asleep.

[ENCOUNTER WITH THE BREATHER CONTINUED]

Remember when I said I took a piss around camp to mark it for animals? When I went back to camp the next morning there was a HUGE stinking piss stain right in the middle of camp and it wasn't mine. Although I was planning to stay for a week, I packed everything and hiked out. finis.


If this thread flies, i will post a thread about my third encounter with the Breather in a few days. peace.

Well, it sounds like a Sasquatch or BigFoot to me. The Pacific Northwest is known for bigfoot activity and I have a few friends that had some scary encounters with echoing and callbacks out in the middle of nowhere. So it is possible that is what you heard, the breathing, and it's telepathic thoughts and ability to speak to you and send you thoughts to scare you away. Hearing the gunshots made it scream and signal to it's friends vocally, and then by knocking on the trees. The sounds you heard that were dripping on your tent were probably from stones or rocks being thrown, or from something in the trees above you that was dropping on you, or even standing very close. The smell of wet dog and stagnated mud is common and usually what drives people to leave a place way before anything scary happens. The size of a bigfoot is much larger than a bear and walks upright, so the sounds of the footsteps would have sounded different than yours, walking on all fours. The territorial nature of the Squatch is like king kong mixed with Chewbacca if you ask me. They want to communicate, but not all of them are smart, or able to understand or like humans. I tend to believe the National Forrests are the migrational areas for the bigfoot families to travel and be far away from humans, and also areas that don't allow guns or weapons that could harm such a creature. Their habitats are protected lands and would limit any potential for shootings of the bigfoots, or killings of humans, or in most cases not being able to see them at all. I believe there could have been a few of them, not just one perhaps, and you could have set up camp in an area that they were nesting or too close to their home base which caused the immediate response when you were trying to go to sleep. I think if you were not invading their space, it would have taken longer for them to stumble on you or come to you from the sounds or the fire. Native Americans in different tribes have similar beliefs when it comes to bigfoots, and would be the first ones to tell you " not to go around a certain hill at sunrise" or the that they are telepathic and can invade your thoughts and scare you. I think the thoughts of how the salmon used to be in that river means the entity or bigfoot would have been old enough to see that, and that it has seen the decline itself. It also shows it depended on the Salmon, and was greatly affected by the depletion. This could have been a ghost, spirit, or entity, even an alien encounter, but could just as easily be a bigfoot. The marking of the territory was to make sure you couldn't stay there when you returned, and maybe cover your scent from any other predators coming your way. It could have saved you from something worse coming your way so I guess the fact you made it out okay means your encounter was with something of higher intelligence, or it would have attacked. If you didn't fire the gun, it may have stayed far enough away to keep playing with you and testing you out by hitting you with rocks. Sorry for the long reply. Hope this can help.

Sounds like a sasquatch, But the feeling of "unholy dread" is usually associated with a dogman, They may give off some kind of infrasound that causes this, But then again, Dogmen are stealthy and barely make a sound unlike what you encountered. So im not sure. They also seem to enjoy causing this fear in people and are not intimidated by guns, Sasquatch usually are and will go away.

Great story, please post more

How long was it between your first encounter with the breather in the swamp and the one in the forest? Perhaps the first encounter was some kind of foreshadowing of what was yet to come when you went camping alone. Knowing that your friends heard the first breather like you did, I imagine that had you been with someone on your camping trip, they would have had the same experience.

Overall, it does sound like some bad juju or maybe a familiar spirit sent to warn you. Personally, I'd feel better near the campfire and would have reconsidered wandering around in the wilderness in the dark. Of course, you must have felt that was safer to do than hang around your campsite at that point.

Perhaps if you had tried offering this entity something like a food ( a fish perhaps) or tobacco offering with some prayers and a promise to leave peacefully in the morning, it might have backed off. It sure seems like firing your gun pissed it off more than just you being there. I know next to nothing about Native American rituals, but burning sweat grass or playing a drum might have been helpful.

Anyway, it's a good scary story to tell around the next campfire while camping with friends, esp. if you took them back to camp at that same spot, LOL.

a reply to: jayfkntee

Possible you stumbled into the territory of a Skin-walker.

en.wikipedia.org...

Wow, just wow.
I remember when I was stationed in Sacramento, I would routinely travel East up Hwy 50 to Loon Lake, Echo Lake or Tahoe, to trout fish in many of the rivers or creeks. I always went through Pollick Pines and Pacific (there is a Ranger Station there). On a whim, I turned down Peavine Ridge Rd. On the maps, it ran into the South Fork of The American River. As the road went down hill, it changes rapidly from paved, to gravel to dirt. By the short time I was along the end of the road by the river, it was no more than a trail. I got out of my truck beneath a double canopy, to check out the large deep blue hole there, when I was over come with an un-explainable fear. I felt as if something very menacing was watching me. I got back into my truck and had to back-up about 75 feet to get to an area that I could go back and forth in, to turn around. When I returned to duty on Monday, I asked around. One guy told me about a similar experience, and he thought it was Bigfoot.
I never went down that trail again.

a reply to: jayfkntee

Thanks for the second installment. It was not disappointing! I've felt that kind of fear or stark, sheer panic before, but not in the wilderness. I won't get into my experiences because the nature of them was nothing like your story, but I can't imagine being out in the middle of nowhere alone in the pitch dark and going through what you did... I think I might have just dropped dead.

There have been some good suggestions of what it might be by other posters here, my first thought was bigfoot as well. But my personal feeling is that it takes something a little otherworldly to cause that level of fear. Like it's sort of projected into your mind or something. I know when I felt that it was no question to me that there was something outside of me causing it. Some one that I couldn't see but was sure was there. I've panicked many times in my life, everyone has, but this is different.

a reply to: bluntheaded

Thank you for all those comments...very interesting. I will respond to all with a single post.

It was about 5 years after this happened when a friend said, "hey jt, tell your bigfoot story". I was like, "huh? what bigfoot story. I don't have a bigfoot story. I don't even believe in bigfoot". HAHAHA. Then I did some studying and analyzed what had happened, and I came to the conclusion it was indeed, a windingo, or sasquatch.

I told the story sharing only what I was thinking at the moment. for example, I have howled with coyotes, so when I heard the "laughing hyena" I knew it was no animal that lived there. its amazing what the mind does in REAL WORLD events like this...instead of considering non-ordinary reality, in the moment my mind came up with "laughing hyena" to explain the sound, because I knew hyenas were real. at the time I believed bigfoot was not real.

I have since had time to analyze events. I agree with the first person who responded that it was PEBBLES being tossed at my tent. I was camped on a pebbly gravel flood bar, and there were no tree limbs over the tent. yes, I believe the damn thing was throwing little pebbles at my tent when I went inside. it was toying with me, or wanted me to come out. that means the thing is damn smart.

I had not considered that the "hyena" was calling to other windingos. but that is a very real possibility, although they all would have heard my gunshots, assuming there was more than one. it seemed to me the thing did that maniacal-laughing-song or whatever it was to scare me. it worked if that was its intent.

the weird thing about when the "Breather" came, is that actually I never heard it come. its like it was already just standing there in the darkness, and I approached it blindly, THEN it started breathing. Since it was in a different place from the "hyena", perhaps there were at least two "somethings" there.

the native americans in this area consider the windingo neither good nor bad. they DONT try to make friends with windingo, and DO fear him. one name for windingo here translates to english as "creek devil" because they live along creeks and watersheds, and they can be devilishly mean.

I have seen researchers say that they can project thoughts. one researcher said he was going to take a picture of one and he heard the words, "if you take that picture I will kill you" in his head. he didn't take the picture. I couldn't get the thing to "talk" to me except for those two words. it DID feel like it was trying to project its psyche upon my mind, as if it didn't like me there. I could fight it off if I lay still and controlled my thoughts, but I felt if I let my mind drift, or if I fell asleep it could push its way in.

I believe the fear was true primal fear coming from a very simple fact. I believe the fear I felt was directly from the fact that it [or they] could kill me any time they wanted, and somehow I could sense that. I believe now that if I had fired the gun at the breather when I was walking out, I would be dead today, not typing this.

the reason I was willing to leave camp just to sleep downstream is because I didn't feel any "hate vibes" when I was chilling downstream earlier in the day, but at camp there was "hate vibes" the whole time.

The third encounter is a WINDINGO encounter. I'll post that up when I get around to it. thank you for the thoughtful responses. I have a series of other threads on anomalous issues I will be posting overtime, because as I stated, I want to support the good old days of ATS before it became solely a political mudpit. Which is why I am posting these.

Let's get going on that 3rd chapter in your involvements with this being!

Wha-wha-whaaaaat?? A couple of days?? Are you posting to the internet and receiving our replies via some sort of Pony Express system, with a friend of yours actually on the internet, and you, out in the wilderness somewhere, 2 days ride from civilisation? Alerting the messenger to your position with smoke signals?

Or do you use a relay system of carrier pigeons, with stationary messengers posted up every so many miles apart, all sending their pigeons back and forth between each other?

You short cut me with your second reply. I was going to say next time out take a cheap flash camera with you and when the breathing starts take a few flashes in their direction. You may get an image to the noise. Oh my, I'm glad I live in rural England. The scariest sounds here are foxes barking.

a reply to: jayfkntee

don't think this thread really flied, so I am relieved of duties..haha. lets face it, ATS is now driven by numbers that come from 40 trolls on each side of the political spectrum getting only political threads fronted, and the hit-numbers drive ATS's owners needs for hot. this shiz is dead.. this is a political mudpit now, until seemingly forever, and nothing else. finis. peace niklahs.

With all the flags and stars, I would say people are indeed interested in hearing about your experiences.

a reply to: jayfkntee
Wow! Very cool story, and I am glad that you did not conclude what it was and left it as an unknown. I look forward to the third part.

I have had one encounter with "external fear" before, so I do know the feeling. It is as if something has imposed fear upon your psyche. My best friend has reported this happening several times in the woods. He and one of our mutual friends witnessed something together, which they both saw and felt.

You are a braver man than I to fire at an unknown power with a 22!

a reply to: jayfkntee

Great thread. Moral to the story: bring something bigger than a .22 when camping alone. Preferably a flame thrower haha.

I would have probably spent the night up in a tree awake, watching till morning. No way I'd be able to sleep on the ground when a giant screaming monster was just stalking me.

originally posted by: crayzeed
You short cut me with your second reply. I was going to say next time out take a cheap flash camera with you and when the breathing starts take a few flashes in their direction. You may get an image to the noise. Oh my, I'm glad I live in rural England. The scariest sounds here are foxes barking.

still some scary things in the UK though I've had a few strange encounters being out and about and one at home when I was younger I was considering posting about them at some point.

Btw the story was riveting jayfkntee and scary to boot I wonder what the thing actually was would've loved to investigate the area after to try and find some other clue as to its identity

Outstanding series of posts. I'm so glad to read something on here that's not politics related. I'm just so tired of each side of the political spectrum saying and doing exactly the same things about each other.

Looking forward to installment 3.

a reply to: jayfkntee

Obviously you met Darth Vader

Have you looked into why these thing or things are attracted to you-considered that exist similar to how people are with the paranormal? Especially being you had the encounter on the other side of the US. It seems to be Sasquatchs that you are coming in contact with. Interested to hear of your continuation of these encounters.