Scariest moment alone in the woods?

This thread reminds me of something Sigurd Olson once said. He was an author who studied wolves in northern MN. Once while he was skiing home under a moonlit night he became aware of a pack of wolves following him. He didn’t have a gun or a hunting knife, and was only armed with the knowledge that wolves do not normally attack men. He stated “I had written a book that had said that, but I didn’t know if the wolves read the book. That always cracked me up.

Since this is about strange things in the woods, I have had for the past maybe 10 years or so had a re-occurring dream that happens once in a blue moon. Jbondo, your from the general area over there north a bit from Beaver County I would imagine, so maybe you know a lil bit about Beaver Falls. Anyhow. Quite a few years ago when I was a junior firefighter with Patterson Heights, me and 2 other juniors Josh and Chris were in their basement working on a lawn mower. We decided we needed some other distraction while we were screwin with it. So it was early November I believe, and we were having our first snow fall of the year and the snow had covered the grass completely.

Well none of us drove at that point, so we walked to my place, about a 20 minute walk. Josh and I walked in to my place to look at the movies I had. I actually think we settled on the movie "Fair Game" actually. Anyhow, Chris decided to stay out on the porch and smoke a cigarette. When we came out, he was literally white as a ghost. When we asked him what was wrong, he stated that there was something that had trotted down the road into the woods. Now Josh and I were thinking Deer. So we recommended that. He said no it walked on 2 hind legs. So the jester thing someone mentioned above sounded familiar.

Now with the snow and all on the road if it was a deer, it would have left tracks. There were no tracks to be found, and it had not been snowing for a few hours, to give you a time frame it was anywhere from 11pm to 2am. All I know it was late, and it was one of those winter night s where you walk out and its dead silent, crystal clear sky, and very crisp/brisk. I ended up staying the night there due to the time afterwards.

On to the dream and the point of this post. Now since then as I said every once and awhile, I'll have this odd dream. It actually sends shivers down me, and I wake up in a cold sweat when I have it. It consists of me walking down to the end of my road, where the hill drops off into the City f Beaver Falls, you can actually see New Brighton from there, so its almost like the border of BF/NB. but there is an access road along someones property that goes into the woods and just basically wraps around to the other side of the woods. Looks to be an access road for the water authority. So if you walk down the road about 50 yards it dips a little bit. So thats the actual look of the area.

Now in this dream I am on this access road, and the sky is funky colors more yellow and orange, with a lil pink/purple, almost like an awesome sunset, but when you look over the hillside its like its fall and all the trees have lost their leaves, but there are like these grass huts in the trees, knowone there, like an abandoned Kelethin from the Game Everquest. Now its perfectly silent throughout this whiole dream until you look to your right and up and see these huts, and all of a sudden you hear thousands and thousands of whispers all at once. Kind of like a school lunch room where everyone is whispering very loudly with the echo and all.

I would say I have had the dream maybe 14 times or so since then, and its the same thing, identically over and over again. Didnt start havin this dream till that incident that night. Havent had it in the past 2-3 years I'd say, but just odd nonetheless.

I'm from McKean County and grew up in the home of the Zippo lighter. I can remember doing the same thing as it was a common thing to just walk around in the middle of the night. That dead calm is something eerie but also quite serene late night during a snowfall. This is something city raised people just never experience. Almost zero traffic as nobody is out driving late at night.

I am familiar with BF. Didn't Sharon Stone grow up near there?

Anyway, your description brings back lots of memories like the Christmas blizzard of I believe 78'. I was out walking my road that Christmas eve around midnight, snow streaming down. Next morning we couldn't even open our back door which was a foot and a half off the ground.

Lots of strange goings on back then.

My scariest moment happened when I was about 10. I live in Newfoundland, so I go in the woods alot. There are no big animals around, save moose and caribou,and the occaisonal coyote. It happened near millertown,a small town of 93 residents. I was walking throuch the snow, and I hear an odd scratching noise, and some movement about 5 feet away. Then, BAM! Something blasted out of the snow and flew off. Turns out it was a grouse, the dumbest bird in the universe,but still, it scared the life out of me.

Yeah grouse have a badf habut of not liking to move until you are right on top of them..

Originally posted by ellroy
reply to post by makeitso

 

don't have anything to contribute to this thread, sorry. just wanted to say thats one fine story (made up or true, i don't care, its still a damn good story).

I gotta agree with Elroy, that was a damn good story....

Originally posted by Firefighter119
Yeah grouse have a badf habut of not liking to move until you are right on top of them..

I was once gliding down a logging road on my motorcycle and all of a sudden *BOOF!* Feathers flying everywhere! It was like the grouse exploded into a million pieces when I hit it head on sitting right in the middle of the well marked cycle trail.

I can also remember one night when I was going to a friends house on my bike. We had trails connecting all up and down the valleys so as not to get hassled by the cops. One of which ran along a fence up thru a pasture. It was about time for the deer to feed and they were out in number. A couple were on the bike trail and I saw them. I decided to rev my engine and go full throttle at them to scare them but often a doe will unpredictably not run and this was one of those times. I spiked the brakes and slid on the wet evening turf all the way to that deer and hit her broadside. It was just a little bump but she heaved her hindquarter around sending me and my cycle to the ground. As I picked my bike up I was plotting my revenge. I jumped on kicked the starter and took off straight for the group now about 20 yds off the trail. I was going to chase them all the way to the trees! But, you guessed it! Again, not one deer even took a step and were now staring me down as I barreled toward them like some kind of nut. This time however I did realize in time that they were going to stand their ground and I pulled off. Proceeding to my friend's house I was humiliated and outsmarted.

I still find this funny to this day. I was about 15 and living in VA at the time. My dad told me our white indoor cat had gotten out the back door, and to help search. Behind my house was a soy bean field, and to the side was all woods. It was night time and with no flash light I walked out to the bean field and saw the cat take off into the woods. I ran down the 1/2 mile trail leading to my friend’s house, chasing the cat. After what seemed like a minuet I was deep in the woods and lost sight of the cat.

Then I hear my dad yell “we found her”. It was at this point I realized I had been chasing a rabbit! As I was trying to get my bearings right, I heard a loud rustle in the leaves 10 feet from me. I took off running to what I thought was the shortest path to the bean field. These woods were full of old rotten trees, and I hit one or two of them, knocking them over. When I got to him, my dad was cracking up at the amount of noise I created out in the woods.

And the cat.... had only walked into the washer/dryer room behind the house.

Technically I wasn't alone but here's the story anway:

Myself and a friend decided it would be great to go out camping one night in the UK. Unlike the US, camping is almost always done here on private property but that's just an aside to the story. Our parents, who were dating each other and couldn't wait to get rid of us, dropped us off deep in the forest in broad daylight and we spent maybe an hour finding a camping spot. Once settled and with the tent up and sleeping bags down we started on the bottle of whiskey I managed to sneak out of the house. Needless to say, we both got fairly drunk and crawled into our sleeping bags for a night in the fresh air.

I have no idea how long it was before I was awaken by the most God awful sound I had ever heard. It was like two baseball bats being hit together with some force followed by this ungodly barking/yelping noise. Suffice to say, we were TERRIFIED and that's when I hatched a plan. Whatever it was may be at a disadvantage, after all, we're smart humans right? So we decided to not be sitting ducks and get out of the tent as fast as possible. We would run TOWARDS the noise ( I dare say the alcohol gave us a measure of bravado) and attempt to scare it or attack it. Erm...it didn't quite work out how we planned! About 5 metres from the tent, at full bore, I hit an object that was immovable (a tree) with my head and knocked myself clean out! My friend spent the rest of the night in a state of extraordinary fear that I had been "gotten" by the creature making the noise.

But what was this mysterious creature? What put the fear of God Almighty into us? How about a 16 inch herbivourous deer called the Reeve's Muntjac! Apparently the area we decided to camp in was infested with them and they make a horrid barking/yelping sound...
Scariest moment in the woods (ignoring the "alone" bit)

[edit on 12-10-2007 by PW229]

[edit on 12-10-2007 by PW229]

Wow, great stories! I have one my Dad told me. When he lived in Northern Connecticut back in the 60's, it was very rural. He lived in a small town with a large forest near it. One night, him and his friends were camping in the woods. The area was very secluded, no one around for miles. Well, they were sitting around and talking, when they heard a shuffling in the dead leaves, like someone dragging his feet. They called out who's there, and no one answered. The shuffling continued and they got really frightened. Then, they saw Jasper, the mentally retarded man from town. He was equally frightened as the boys!

My story happened when i was 19 years old.

I was stationed in Sennelager, Germany, and one night i was parked up in my car with my girlfiend on a forest track deep in the middle of the ranges.

It was pitch black and the track was extremely narrow, barely wide enough for my car to fit on it. There were trees all around, very close to the car. The only light came from the car interior light.

All of a sudden, from out of the blue something huge hit the side of my car door, when i say huge i'm talking the size of a man, and it was big enough to rock the car.

I spun around so fast and shouted in shock, and the only way i can describe what hit my car was like a man size figure but it was jet black with it's wings/arms/whatever opened out like a huge bat......similar to how dracula opens his cloak on those films.

This thing hit the car in a downwards motion, as though it had come from the trees and smacked into the side of my car, and once it hit, it sort of "flapped hard" aggresively and franticly against the car door and window for a split second before disapearing.

Needless to say i almost filled my pants, i drove home faster than i've ever driven before.

My girlfriend and i never spoke about it whilst we were together, well not to anyone else anyway.

Funnily enough, 16 years later i end up on a site called ATS, and was amazed to read stories about Mothman. This is the only thing i can compare what i experienced that night with.

Can't explain it, gives me goose pimples even trying to.

CX.

I've told my Bigfoot story on here so many times you should have read it by now. Though I was in a car and driving down the road, that is still the scariest moment I've had.

I suppose the second scariest happened in the woods that were in town. I live in Arkansas and I was in Fort Smith at the time. I had to walk home one night because of car troubles. There was one section of town that had a two block stretch of woods with no street lights. I wasn't worried about it, hell, I was in town. I started walking thru this short dark area when something in the woods on the far side of the road started pacing me. I could hear it walking thru the leaves and brush and it kept right beside me the whole way thru. I was braced for battle should it come out of the woods but it never did. As I made it back into the street lights, it stopped at the end of the woods.

mrwupy,

I grew up in a town surrounded by a national forest and my road wound up thru a valley to a dead end at about 5 miles. As you went up there were houses on both sides of the road but there was this one stretch like you said about a mile long with just deep woods on either side of the road. We called it "no man's land". Funny thing is all the weird things I can remember and not one happened while walking thru no man's land. Other than diving into the ditch to avoid the police after curfew. Yea, our town had a curfew of 10:30pm and I guess that's why we had almost no crime.

If anything were going to happen I would have bet it would be there. Heck, we didn't name it no man's land just because of the lack of civilization.

Kids!

I went and stayed on a friends farm and almost got killed by a feral pig. It ran up to me and barged me over, so my friend tried to smash it with a metal stake he ripped out of the ground. That just angered it more, so we climbed the nearest tree faster than the speed of light lol. It got scared and ran away after my friends brother rode up on a motorbike looking for us, after we got back to the house I had to go to hospital to get my cuts cleaned and some antibiotics, because they carry all sorts of diseases apparently.
I've still got a massive scar on my thigh

I've actually got 2 that are kind of a tie. One was in FL, me and some other guys had been trailing a group of wild hogs and were pretty deep in a swamp. We had lost the hogs and wound up in this little clearling in the swamp with thick brush all around. We were just standing around talking when the sound started..

It started off like a low pitched growl, a rumble. It was very close and very loud. As it continued it rose in pitch climbing the scale from a growl, to a roar, to a thoat tearing high pitch scream that sounded almost, but not quite human. Then it ended. I guess the sound lasted about 15 seconds. All was quite. We all were just looking at each other and then the next noise was the "click", "click", "click", "click" of us turning the staftey off our rifles.

We'd all been in the woods alot - had never heard anything like that before. It wasn't a deer, bear, gator, hog, pathner or anything we'd ever heard before. We decided heading back to our trucks sounded like a wise plan.

The other was my stalker in the woods. I used to hunt an area in GA. There was this one spot along an old loging road where the woods were very thick and tall. I usually made my way out after sunset so it would be dark when I went through that spot. The trees were so tall and thick there that only the tinyest bit of moonlight shown through.

Everytime I'd go through there in the dark something would pick up my trail and follow me through the woods off to one side. I would move, it would move. I would stop, it would stop. I'd try to spot whatever it was with my flashlight but I never even saw any eye-shine. From the leaves and sticks crunching it sounded to be of some size. It would always break off when I got within about 30 yards of my truck. That must have happened 20 times and I have no idea what it was.

I was stationed on the island of Guam a few years ago, one nite me and some friends were out having a good time and we were heading home and we stopped along this road to "relieve our selves" it was pitch black and the thick jungle was not too far away maybe 25 feet. These girls we were with told us to watch out for the jungle spirits they would chase off people who wandered to close to the jungle at nite. well we were standing there and the girls started to freak out because they seen shadows approaching us and I was like yeah right! and I started to here this weird low pitched noise and as soon as I could focus out on the jungle I seen the shadows coming closer! I totally freaked at that point and my buddy was allready running back towards the car. I tucked tail and never ran so fast in my life! I had the most strangest feeling and seen something that I could not explain trying to come at me in the darkness. When the locals talked about spirits and other paranormal things that happen in the jungle I am now a firm believer.

I live out in the "sticks" so I'm no stranger to the woods. However, I've never had a truly scary moment in the woods. I've had a few creepy moments, though.

I was fishing in the West Fork of the Trinity River near my house in Boyd, Texas. I was on private property and there were no houses near my fishing spot. In fact, I was miles away from the closest house. I wasn't having any luck so I decided to head back to my truck. The wind started to pick up and I could hear the laughter of children. The sound came at me from all sides. It wasn't exactly scary but it was very creepy. I didn't see any other vehicles once I made it back to the road.

The only time that was remotely scary was when I came across a wild hog/boar/feral pig/whatever you want to call it. I didn't actually see the swine, I only heard it. I've been told a sow can be pretty vicious when with child. I didn't wish to stick around and find out.

[edit on 10/23/2007 by BrandonK]

My friend and I were riding through Cannock Chase on our bikes. I believe it would have been Summer/Autumn, 1997 or 98 and it was starting to get later, and we were thinking about heading home.

We were up on one of the hills and could see a fair distance, there wasn't really a lot of noise either and we were about ready to leave.
As we were making our way home down the hills, we heard this enormous roar, down the hillside deep in the forest. We had no idea what it was but the closest thing I can really compare it to is the MGM Lion's roar. We heard it a second time that afternoon as we were riding out, and it has puzzled us since. We couldn't see anything making the noise since we were up on the hill the treetops hid what was underneath.

There aren't any bears or wolves in Cannock Chase.

Not exactly scary, but possibly the scariest moment I've had in the forest.

well, this isn't a scary one, but it is most certainly the weirdest thing that happened to me in the woods.

Me and my dad were backpacking in lapland, well over the polar circle, but in summer.
The sun doesn't set so we walked until we were tired, and it started raining. By then we we're on the absolute border of the first map we had, heading into the second one. Simply put we only new more or less where we were.
Still, no problem, we'd done this before, so we put down the packs, string up a poncho, light a fire more or less in it's cover, put up the tent, make some tea and get ready to call it the end of a long day.

However, before we say hallo to the sandman, we always collect any gear that we've used. I can't find my handaxe.

I tell my dad 'listen, I cut these branches, then slammed it in this trunk'
My dad tells me 'listen, this is one of the few remaining true forests, there was dead wood all around, don't put that axe in a living tree XXX' the x's stand for a curse about how I may have been XX-ing young but should have known better.

we searched in a spiral pattern outwards from that tree for 25 minutes, didn't find a thing.
my dad said we should call it an evening, and if I maybe could avoid doing anything like that for the rest of our journey
when we walked back to our tent the axe was in the tree we both examined, the tree I swear to god we couldn't find it in.

Me and my dad never talked about it, all he said was, this is one place where our rules don't apply.

After that, except for emergencies, I only ever used dead wood.

I bow hunt ..many times in areas I have never been. I'm telling ya when it is pitch black in a unfamiliar woods...things have a way of taking on a "Blair Witch" kind of look. One time I saw a brillent green falling star at the end of hunting time...that was kind of chilling also