Tell your creepy Forest Story

Well its about that time for camping and time spent in the woods, I thought I would bring this great thread to the top and see if anyone has something to add to it. a reply to: Skid Mark

Oh I love a good creepy story so I'd like to share one that happened to me 3 nights ago.

We live on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee on a beautiful wooded lot with plenty of tall oaks, maples and dog woods with a few hickorys. To say that its dark outside after 10 pm is an understatement so we put up motion lights on the house so I could stop scaring myself silly while taking the dogs out. Here is my story:

So its about 11:30pm and Im taking my lil dogs out for their pre bedtime wee when I hear something up in the trees about 300 feet away from where I'm standing. Its very faint but I know I wasnt imagining it as all 3 dogs stop sniffing the ground and look towards the back yard. We all hear it again just a bit closer. At this point im curious and not scared but then it happens again as my husband walks outside to see whats taking us so long, so I quickly describe the sound ( it sounds remotely like a person pursing their lips and moving their finger up and down in slow motion while blowing air slowly out and a cross of the PREDATOR Noise from the movie) yes you can laugh now, my husband did and he starts walking towards the treeline.
Maybe a minute has passed and now the sound is closer and its moving tree to tree right towards my husband, I shout to him "Im not staying out here to watch you die'" and run as fast as I can back to the house to grab the gun. All 3 dogs are now hiding on the bed Im reaching for the gun when he comes back in and gave me a dorky look and told me too google owl hoots and not to shoot my toe off.
It was an Eastern Screech Owl. But for 10 seconds of my live I was certain that Predator was real and had migrated to East Tennessee and I had just left my husband out side as a sacrifice And no he is never going to let me live this down.

I took a hike and met some very large and dangerous animals on many different occasions. They didn't attack, well one did start toward me.
It makes you realized that when you are out in the deep forests there are large predators that can more than account for missing persons.
Also I have seen a half dozen animals that are not thought to exist. The only one I feel free to discuss is a dog species that is unknown.
I have been skiing and run into packs of wild dogs in the woods that may have been hunting me in the snow. Coy dogs were first discovered within 20 miles of my house.
The story was as I was driving along I stopped at a pullout to check out a dead animal.
It had massive shoulders and a large triangular jaw but a very flat head. Kind of like a pit bull but with a flat skull.
It had markings on it's forelegs consistent with a coy dog and had a massive pit bull like body with wolf like markings.
The tail looked like a fox or coyote tail. It had very short legs though which what was strange.
Looked nothing like a wolf, a coyote, a mutt, purebred, coy dog but had features of all.
I think I saw it's partner later on stalking some pets in a yard.
If it got it's jaws on you you would not have been able to get them off, like a bear trap.
I may have had a third sighting but with such severe weather and late at night I could not be certain.
Kind of looked like Anubis that time, same massive shoulders in all three cases.
a reply to: misskat1

a reply to: starswift

Oh man, you have to tell us the other 5 animals you saw! That's why this thread exists!

Seems like a Creepy Pasta esque thread we got goin' on here gentlemen! That's alright though.

I don't have any of my own to add, but one of my instructors has had his fair share of encounters with the strange. He'd spend some periods of class where the lectures were done for the day, telling us stories of his encounters with bigfoot in the Colorado mountains. He would say "The 'critter' and I have respect for each other, I leave him alone, he leaves me alone."

Granted when he'd share these stories, his mannerisms and language would make anyone chuckle instead of shriek in horror though.

Carry on!

OK, a few more that are not that controversial. A Black Panther which ran past my car one night, A two hundred year old turtle that was know to exist 100 years ago was still going strong last I knew, I tickled it's cheek with a grass straw, it was mellow, I guess you would be after 200 years, saw another record breaking turtle of another species nearby years later.

Another, which I just looked up, is a giant millipede. They exist in Africa but this was in the New Hampshire which was part of Africa about 400 million years ago, so these guys probably are from that period and have survived in a micro climate.

The other two are thought to be extinct but I don't discuss them in public forums to preserve them from unneeded attention.

a reply to: Goldcurrent

I wonder how I missed this thread...

I've had several encounters with "the unknown", as have many of my family on my dad's side...we seem to attract it somehow.

Anyway...

For the most part I grew up in the woods, SE Washington St., and south central Washington, up around Mt. Adams and Mt St. Helens (before she got grumpy). ...and for about fifteen years, I lived and worked in Alaska, and traveled all over the state.

In keeping with the theme... Here's one of my creepy forest stories.

It's kind of a two parter...

Part one happened when I was about fourteen or so... My Dad, his brother, Me, and my brother were spending about a week in the Gifford Pinchot Nat'l. Forest near Mt. Adams...sort of to pick huckleberries and blueberries for canning and freezing, and do some fishing. One afternoon, I was picking over a patch of blueberries and stumbled upon a trail of sorts, so being the adventurous young teen that I was, off down the trail I went. I remember thinking it odd there were no tracks of any sort, no deer, or elk, bear, not a sign. But didn't really think much of it, at the time... **oops**

Well, anyhow, the trail led down into this utterly gorgeous beaver pond filled area. Surrounded by Ponderosa pines, and various ground covering plants. I stepped off the trail into the little vale, and it was like another place in time... It was instantly pointed out to me, by what I don't know, and I really don't want to know, that I was not welcome.

I'm many things, but stupid isn't one of them... I left. Rapidly. Right back up that trail that had puzzled me a few moments before...

I told my Dad and Uncle about it that evening after they noticed that I was somewhat preoccupied...

I expected a bit of ridicule, or teasing, anyway... Nope.

Both of 'em grew up and spent many days out in those woods, when much of it was still wilderness. As did my Grand-father, oddly enough, one of my Great-great grand fathers was in the area several years before Lewis and Clarks famous trip...

So they're intimately familiar with the area. My dad told me there are areas in those woods around Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens where man is not welcome. Nor any of their works.

Years later... My uncle musingly said that the only reason I walked out of the little vale was that I was so young... I've never tested that theory...not intentionally anyway. Which brings us to...

Part Two.

Years later, in 1988, I and a friend were back packing in Denali Nat'l. Park in Alaska. We'd been out about a week, and were about to head back the next day. We found a gorgeous little brook fed pond, with an awesome view of Denali that would surely be gorgeous in the morning light... So we set up camp. It was about nine'ish when my little voice began to tell me something wasn't right. Now I learned a long time ago to trust that little voice, I call it my reptile brain...it's almost never wrong. For some odd reason, I chose to ignore it this time.

The night was clear and cold, no moon, but thousands of stars, and just the faintest hint of aurora borialis overhead. Something woke me up...and I instantly flashed back to that day on the slopes of Mt. Adams. The same feeling of being unwelcome, and in more than a little danger. My friend never even noticed it...city boy that he was/still is. I spent the rest of the night sitting with my back to the fire, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, praying fervently. Just before dawn, the feeling subsided a bit, still there, but not quite so...terrifying.

I know my friend was puzzled at the speed with which I packed our camp...

But I was going to be a long, long walk away from there before the sun set on us again.

I have no idea what those areas are... I know various peoples around the world have legends of things like fairy rings, entrances into another place, another time. For some odd reason, Rip Van Winkle always comes to mind. Maybe those places were doorways of some sort, I don't know. For damned sure, I'll not go out of my way to find out.

So, there you have it. One, or maybe it's two, of several creepy forest tales.

a reply to: seagull
That was awesome. There's a place like that in the back of the holler where I live. It has a very unwelcome feeling.

Another creepy forest story, kind of a prequel to the first part of my last post.

My dad told me this story... Long ago. I think I was ten.

Anywho...

He was in his early teens, so this was in the late 30's. He was out in the forest just barely on the southern slopes of Mt. Adams. Camping. Doing a little gold panning. Bein' a kid, basically.

He'd been out about a week, or so...and he began to feel like he was being watched, off and on for several days. Well he'd heard stories about the area from locals who'd been there since just after the Civil War when the area first became truly settled, or began to be, and some of those tales/legends are just bone chilling.

...any way, he headed for home, which was a couple/three days away on foot. On the second day, he felt like he was being watched as he hiked down the Mt. towards the homeplace, which is about equidistant between Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood. The views on a clear day are spectacular...

Well, he had to camp once more, and all that night, he was aware that the night critters were being very quiet. At dawn, he moved out again, and about half a mile into the hike, he found a footprint. Big. Bare. Well, that area is basically synonymous with Sasquatch... What was amazing was as he was looking at it, a blade of grass, and this is early spring, that had been pressed down came back up. The track had been only minutes old, about ten minutes later he smelled what he describes as though something dead had been laying in the sun for about a week. Only he'd been through that area only days before, and hadn't smelled anything.

Now there could be any number of explanations for this confluence of events...

Grandpa, several years earlier, just before he went off to France for WWI, had had a similar encounter while out hunting. ...and later, as a county sheriff in Klickitat county, he saw Sasquatch off in the distance. Not all that far away from where my dad saw UFO's off towards Mt. Rainier in 1947.

So the area has a long history of creepin' family members out.

All of my Uncles have stories from the area, too. Up and down the river, from Vancouver to just east of White Salmon.

a reply to: SinMaker

could I suggest that having built your platform on a tree, and a tree being a living thing with decent amount of "life" (understand movement in reaction to wind, weight, stress...) it was the platform moving relatively to the ladder rather than the opposite?

hey ATS

I have been through a fair amount of stories on this thread to my full enjoyment. Even though it sometimes take the road of "tell a scary campfire story" rather than "relate a story that hammened to you in the wild", I am able to leave my tight-ass professor mindset and enjoy the show.
few things:
-first I would like to share my story. Nothing very impressive but most def had an impact on me.
my weird moment in the woods
Also I would like to share a few considerations regarding all these stories and their context.
- As a general comment I think that as civilised beings we are all used to our confort, our relation to artificial light and technology, any experience that takes this away from us is in itself a very specific context prone to put us consciously or not in a state of stress. Added to this the fact that it is probably deeply rooted in our genes to be afraid of the dark, densly vegetated and wild areas.
Therefore, the feeling of being watched and "hunted" in a forest is probably, at least to a great majority, a given "survival" mindset that only experience and time spent out there can tune down.
So you probably got it, in my opinion, this feeling is a survival instinct that tells us that we are potential food and would have a longer lifespan.
I'm not saying that all the previous accounts are pure imagination but my personal point of vue is that at least a few can be explained that way.
- for some reason, dog sized/looking creatures walking on their rear legs seem to be a reccurent sight? weird!
reminds me of this silly/entertaining show I saw the other day... your average alien-wearwolf story ;p
paranormal witness _ the wolf pack
Anyway, I really enjoyed going through the stories even though I hope they won't influence me too much next time I go out there by myself ;p

a reply to: misskat1
I've been talking to a woman from Papua New Guinea. She told me about these creatures or people that are invisible that will take people back to their homes in the forest. She described these things as a kind of guardian spirit of nature. She said they put a person on a leaf (not sure what that means) and take them. If the villagers are looking for the person that's taken, the things will let the person go. She said that when she was little she was taken. Her dad was calling out for her and she was let go. I seem to remember a similar story that was told by David Paulides on Coast to Coast Am. Make of it what you will.
ETA: We weren't talking about anything in particular when she told me this. It just came out of the blue. I didn't have any impression that she was trying to impress me or anything and don't have the feeling she was lying, or even know why she would lie.

I spent my teen years on the edge of the Mojave Desert, in the Antelope Valley, California. We used to hike and go 4 wheeling quite a bit on the west end of the valley. We located a small mining camp, in the foothills. 5 or 6 buildings that were in various stages of decay with only one having any standing walls left. They were all collapsing into themselves, so we assumed they had been abandoned for some time. My stepfather was a Viet Nam Veteran with many outdoor skills, and I was a student of his. He decided it would be cool to camp at the mining camp we found and we proceeded to make arrangements to do so. With enough food stuffs(including way too much homemade beef jerky!) for a weekend we took off. We made camp above the cabins under a large tree, it was spring and fairly warm in the day but cold at night. As we settled into the tent that night there were noises. All the usual scary twig snaps, leaves rustling etc. but we were armed with rifles and did not succomb to fear.
The next morning we ate and went for a hike early in the morning. As we moved uphill on a bit of a dirt path we noticed a bush to the side of us was crushed. Very odd it seemed so we investigated further and found another bush crushed about a yard and a half away. By crushed I mean stepped or stomped on, the size of these bushes:3' wide & 2-3' tall. These bushes had limbs maybe 2 to 3 inches in diameter and they were shattered as if something had really stomped on them. Again we looked further and determined that these broken bushes stretched of in both directions as far as we could see. Something very big had seemingly run down the hill diagonally from the top of the ridge down to farther than we could see, approximately a half mile above us and more than a mile below us until we couldn't make out the trail any longer. That was enough for me and before I could say anything my stepdad looked at me with a very pale face and said "GO!". We ran back to the camp and threw our campsite, without breaking it down, into any part of the car it would fit into. With corners of sleeping bags trailing out windows and a trunk lid that was wired down we got the hell out of there!

a reply to: dondrews

Its always a treat to realize people have added new stories. Thank you! Cheap entertainment at its finest!!

Ttt love these stories

Going to add some stories of my own but I'm on my phone right now so I can't really type something long. So I will just add this for now.11 haunted forest you should never set foot in

a reply to: SolAquarius

I'm looking forward to reading your tales.

...and the link is bookmarked for later this evening.

My Woodland Encounter With the Jersey Devil?


This experience happened to me in the 90’s at at time I was living in New Jersey.

I was fascinated with local lore of the Jersey Devil who was a demonic like being with red eyes

And bat like wings that supposedly lived in the pine barrens of New Jersey.

Some of my friends would tell tales about haunted roads out in the pine barrens where the Jersey devil wood bolt down the woods and run across the hood of your car if you parked on these roads. I loved these paranormal stories and would let my teenage mind soak it all up.

Perhaps my knowledge of the Jersey Devil would skew my perception but one night I had an encounter with something unnerving in the pine barrens.


I lived in a Suburban neighborhood that happened to back up to the pine barrens and several Old Man Made lakes created as cranberry bogs.

There were dirt roads that branched away from the well lit and paved neighborhoods leading into the pine barrens.
I would often go on long walks along these roads with the family dog.

One evening I was making my way back home along a dirt road while walking the dog.
The Sun had already set and it was pretty dark I was flanked on both sides of the road by forest
I was only a short distance away from where the suburban street lit neighborhood I lived in was.
As I was walking along I heard a sound about a hundred feet or so into the woods to my left.
It sounded like the metal of a ladder then became increasingly bizarre and started to sound like metallic animal screeching. The sound was come high up in the tree top levels. I stood in a daze trying to process what it was. Then one thought jolted me out of my trance, Jersey Devil!

Quickly all the stories I had read about this being flooded my mind and all the frightening encounters others supposedly had with it. Adrenalin surged into my blood and I bolted with the dog at my side. I tried to run as fast as I could the final stretch of the dirt road and reach the safety of the neighborhood lights. Once I reached the paved road of the neighborhood and felt the sense of security of having houses and streetlights around me. I turned around and looked into the ominous darkness of the road that entered the pine barrens and kept asking myself what the hell I just encountered.

Whatever was making the noise I had no intention of sticking around to find out if it was the Jersey Devil or Something else.
Perhaps it was just some crazed woodland creature but I have heard fox screeches and sounds from owls that sound like someone getting murdered.
But what I heard that evening in the woods was unlike anything I have heard before.

This Video Gives Details on The Jersey Devil for those that don't know about it.


I have even more weird forest stories that I might post latter.

New Jersey has got a ton on creepy stuff.

Like a road literally called Shades of Death Road

I entered high school in Lexington, Kentucky in 1972. Soon after the school year began, a boy who was a senior at my school was found hanging by the neck from a tree at a local horse racing track in the trees behind the stables. It was an apparent suicide. This location is right in the middle of town, but at the time it looked quite rural. It is now apartments and fraternity houses for the University of Kentucky. Anyhow, he was found by a couple of young kids playing. Now, I didn't know this poor guy at all, but to this day I remember his name. Some of my friends knew him, and one of my friends was a poll bearer at his funeral, and told me he was buried in his letter jacket.
Fast-forward twenty years, and I'm now a Major in the Marine Corps stationed in Okinawa, Japan. I was a pilot, but was serving a year as an Air Officer for a Marine Infantry Regiment. It was a great year, and we deployed a lot, all over Japan and the Pacific.
We were doing a two-week exercise on the Northern tip of Okinawa, in a place that was triple-canopy jungle. It looked just like Jurassic Park. A Marine Infantry Regiment Headquarters sets up and moves as the forces move towards the objective. One of my responsibilities was to move out ahead of the Headquarters, select, set up and run what we called the Jump Command Post, or Jump CP, to maintain communications with our lower units while the rest of the Headquarters tore down the Command Post Tent, the communications equipment and antennae, loaded up the trucks and HUMVEEs and moved to the new location. The Jump CP was run from my HUMVEE, which had all of the radios needed until the Regimental Headquarters CP was moved into position and was up and operating.
It was about midnight, and we were finishing a staff meeting in the CP Headquarters tent. I was informed that I was to take the Jump CP out at first light, find a suitable location in a certain grid square and the rest of the Command would move as soon as I was set up.
We broke up the meeting and I began walking through the black jungle to my fighting hole where I would sleep for the night. We were spread far out from each other, so I was walking through the dark jungle by myself, when all of a sudden I thought about those kids finding the boy hanging from a tree in Lexington some 20 years before. I thought to myself that if I had been them and found him hanging from a tree, I probably would have crapped all over myself. I hadn't thought about that event for over 20 years, but there, alone in that dark jungle on the other side of the world, it came creeping into my brain. I even remembered and could recite his name. I found it made that dark jungle even creepier, and I climbed into my hole, pulled a poncho over me and slept fitfully.
The next morning, I set off in my HUMVEE with a driver and two communications Marines, and we drove through the jungle until we reached the approximate location I needed to find an adequate site for the Regimental CP. We had been driving down a narrow jungle trail for several clicks, and I looked up a branch trail going up a hill to a small clearing, and that there was a small Japanese car sitting at the edge of the clearing. It was strange to see a car in the jungle, and the fact this was military land, but I figured that if a car could get up there, we could too and that might be good spot for the Regimental CP.
I had the driver stop, and while everyone else stayed in the HUMVEE, having a smoke and enjoying being away from the flag pole for a while, I walked alone up the hill to the clearing to see if this would indeed be a spot we could use.
As I approached the clearing, I saw a Japanese man standing with his back to me at the opposite edge of the clearing. He was wearing the mint green one-piece coveralls and white plastic helmet on his head that utility workers wear in Japan. I called out a greeting to him, and he didn't respond. I then noticed how absolutely still and silent it was. Not a bird, insect or animal could be heard.
I walked up to the man, and as I got next to him, could see that he wasn't standing there, but was hanging from the neck by a small thin wire from the tree at the edge of the clearing, his feet less than a half inch from the ground, and quite dead.
I moved back down to our HUMVEE and we called back to the Regimental CP to inform them what we had found. We stayed there until the local Japanese Police showed up. Due to the remote location, it took about three hours for them to find us. The police found two suicide notes in the man's car, and determined that he had committed suicide sometime after midnight the night before, just when the memory of a similar incident about a boy I didn't know 20 years earlier popped into my head. The police also said that because of the remoteness of the location, had we not been conducting our exercise, he most likely would have remained missing and unaccounted for, for years. They considered it a miracle that we found him just hours after he killed himself.