True Scary Stories From the Woods

Step into the deep, dark woods—where the trees whisper, shadows move on their own, and not everything that watches you is human. In this chilling episode, we bring you true scary stories from the wilderness, featuring terrifying encounters and unexplained events from campers, hikers, and outdoor explorers who ventured too far from the comfort of civilization. These true stories will make you think twice before stepping into the woods alone.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire crew, let's get it on. Dangerous Visitor by

(00:22):
Minus Delila. I went on a group camping trip in
the middle of nowhere, Arizona, only to awaken one night
and here's something sniffing the outside of our tent. My
immediate reaction was that it was likely a bear or
some animal that came across our site, and just maybe
my dumbass friends didn't tie up the garbage. Seconds later,

(00:44):
I could hear the sniffing go to the tent next
to ours, and everyone in mine grabbed one another quietly
to acknowledge we were all awake and we were all
aware of what was going on outside. Moments later, a
friend and another tent popped out and stole to scream
and make noise. He had a gun too, He was
hoping the noise would scare off whatever animal was on

(01:07):
our site. Turns out it wasn't an animal. It was
some guy who had gone through our coolers and food
and also decided it would be okay to sniff our tents.
Our friend chased him off, and we immediately packed our
shit and left. A year after that incident, my dumb

(01:28):
ass friends and I went back to the nearby area
thinking what we encountered was a one time incident. This time,
we thought we'd outsmart any possible creepers, and instead of
camping in our tents, we all slept in the beds
of our trucks and SUVs because you know, they can't
possibly sniff a toyota ta coma right. Anyway, it was

(01:48):
the middle of the night. I was passed out in
the back of my suv when I suddenly felt a
bright light on my face. Naturally, I would have woken
up custan asked who was doing that when however, I
instantly knew to pretend to be asleep and not let
the individual know I was awake. I lay there next

(02:08):
to my girlfriend, hoping she would do the same as I,
and I kept an ear out for any unusual sounds
like sniffing. All I could hear was a friend snoring
by the camp fire. After the light left my car,
I heard the person walk to the next truck and
shine his light on my friends in there. I slowly

(02:29):
looked up and it ended up being some older guy
just standing there staring at every one while they slept.
I waited until he left the camp site, and then
I busted my ass out of that truck and woke
up my friends, most of whom had also been pretending
to sleep, and realized what was going on. We didn't

(02:50):
go back camping to that site ever again. Creepy backwoods
Experiences by Anonymous. For about two years, I worked as
an instructor at a therapeutic wilderness program in western North Carolina.

(03:13):
I was in charge of at risk youth and my
job included all the responsibilities and nuances associated with that.
Shifts ran sixteen days straight on the clock, twenty four
seven of that time and all spent backpacking. Most of
this takes place in Nantahala National Forest, DuPont State Forest,

(03:35):
and Panthertown Valley. Here are some of the creepy things
that happened to me and my groups out there, Teased
by a hillbilly. Without delving too much into programming in
wilderness therapy in general, I do have to explain certain
aspects of the job, so bear with me. Because none
of these kids are voluntarily in the program, some are

(03:58):
of flight risk. To minimize the success of potential runaways,
staff are required to sleep under an open tarp and
between the doors of the tents. Often our setup looked
like two tents facing under a large a frame tarp
with staff sleeping in between. Another precaution is called the
boot line. The kid's boots stay lined up under gear

(04:21):
tarp at night. It's hard to run in your camp
crocs anyhow. This boot line is visible from underneath the
sleeping tarp. So on this particular night, we were camped
in some of the most far flowing areas the program
goes to. We simply referred to it as Parkway Expo
because our expedition often began with being dropped alongside the

(04:43):
Blue Ridge Parkway and hiking into the rugged wilderness that
surrounds it. It's a spot called wet camp Gap. From
the sleeping tarp, I could see the boot line across
camp in the direction of my feet, and it was
my job to wake up once every three hours for
sign headcount. I woke up from my three am check

(05:04):
and turned on the red filter on my headlamp. Had
a weird feeling. I first scanned the boot line and
something wasn't right. Thirteen pairs of boots. It took some
time to register. Usually when something doesn't feel right, there's
a pair or two missing and a kid or two gone.

(05:24):
But there were only twelve kids. At the end of
the boot line, there was a pair of tall men's
hunting boots. Staff boots aren't kept there, and as that
dawned on me in my sleepy haze, I snapped to reality,
sat up, and switched to my white light. It cast
light across the camp, and the second the light fell

(05:47):
on the hunting boots, the man who had been standing
in them the whole time, suddenly turned and walked off
into the brush. That was a moment of sheer terror
as I jumped up after him, but he was long
gone by the time I wiggled out of my sleeping bag.
The following day, we were packing up and making breakfast

(06:08):
when a group of three men walked through the field
we were in. The trail ran right through it, so
it wasn't unusual, but they came out of the woods
from a strange angle perpendicular to the trail. I was
over in the far corner of camp with one co
instructor doing a daily briefing when they entered just a
few yards away. They stopped and looked at us. All

(06:32):
were armed, and I recognized one of the men's boots
immediately gave me a scare last night, I said. None
of them spoke. They only stared blankly. You guys, okay,
you lost Still no response. The situation felt uneasy as

(06:55):
they stared at us, their gaze unbroken. Here, I said,
let me show you on my map was already in
my hand. I got up from the stump I was
sitting on and approached them, and the trio suddenly turned
and walked on across the clearing and out of view.
I was glad we were moving the opposite way and

(07:15):
only had one more night till our pickup and transport
to base camp. That final night, we were all sound asleep.
About two am or so, the night was broken by
a blood curdling scream. It was my female co instructor.
She was frantically running her fingers through her hair and

(07:36):
completely inconsolable. I got her away from the group and
canned her down enough so that she could speak, and
she says that she woke up to what she assumed
was a large spider or a mouse in her hair,
but when she turned on her headlamp, she was greeted
by the face of the tall booted hillbilly wearing night
vision goggles he'd gotten almost a full break in before

(08:01):
she woke up and he fled. We never saw any
more of them, but she never came back for another
shift either, the poor thing. A few weeks later, the
local senar found a woman who'd gone missing nearby. She'd
been accosted by a man and tied to a tree
and left there. She was found alive something like four

(08:22):
days later, still bound to the tree surrounded in Panthertown.
Panthertown Valley is a special hiking and camping area within
the larger Nantahala National Forest. This was an entirely different
group of kids. We were camped down on the valley
floor in a pine forest down from Salt Rock. This

(08:45):
stand of trees is particularly creepy simply because it's cold
and dark even on sunny days, but nights are just
plain eerie in there. It was getting toward bedtime nine pm.
We were gathered around the fire having nightly circle. The
quiet evening ritual was broken by a huge crash. It

(09:07):
was in the direction of our bear hang, where all
of our food was suspended from a tree out of
reach of bears and raccoons. We all booted up and
ran over, and the bags were laying on the ground,
but no animals in sight. Had the rope snapped, No,
it came untied. I joked at my group's expense about

(09:28):
shoddy now work, and we resecured the set up and
returned to camp and settled into bed. Around midnight, bam,
the bags fell again. Now I was mad. I don't
like waking up to rehang food because of something as
preventable as a second botch not. I just woke up

(09:50):
the boys and they swore they tied it right. It
didn't matter. We had to rehang it anyway, So everyone
booted up and dragged on over. This time I was
going to tie the damn knot. I was in mid
lecture with a knot lesson went across the stand of pines.
The dying fire suddenly went black with a hiss, and

(10:11):
our tents disappeared into darkness. It wasn't raining. Someone had
doused our fire. We could hear their footsteps, and now
some of them behind us. We grabbed the food bags
and ran back to the tents, but no one was there.
But there were footsteps all around us in the woods,

(10:32):
Branches being broken off trees everywhere. This went on till
at least four am and the next morning the only
evidence was a plethora of freshly broken off pine branches
and a half charred baby doll hanging from the rope
where our food had been strange storage by WDH sixty

(11:01):
six to two. The creepiest camping trip I've ever been
on was with my best friend. We were in a
semi remote camping area, drivable usually to get to it,
but definitely only by four by four. It was a
semi maintained camping area, as in, there were a couple
of fire pits, a few rotten picnic tables, and a

(11:23):
run down out house. Parks checked this place once a
year if that. So we got there and started setting
up when my buddy wandered over to the shitter and
opened the door. He stood there for a second or
two and then closed the door and then went to
the second one, went in and came out a few

(11:44):
minutes later. He came back to me and said, go
check out that first one. I assumed someone shit on
the floor or an animal got stuck in there and
died or something. Nope. Three full backpack and I'm talking
big bags like the bag I have that size I
used for week long trips, so we were being nosy.

(12:08):
We opened them up. Two were full of good quality gear,
nothing unusual there. The third was full of skittles, bulk bags,
small bags, regular size, tropical sour, every flavor and size
of bag you can imagine. The thing was just full
of fucking skittles. We camped there for four days and

(12:32):
never saw a soul, and the bags were still there
when we left. We let the CEOs know when we
got to civilization. Who left all that gear? Why did
one person pack eighty liters of skittles? I don't know,
but it was weird. Bad neighbor by an eye. I

(13:02):
lived in a very small town once where I worked
from my laptop, like population two hundred small. I was
in a small cabin in the woods, lots of woods,
though it was next to a highway. One day I
was walking my dog and heard two gunshots somewhere nearby.
I didn't think much of it. It was a hunting

(13:23):
area and it was kind of redneck. Like the next
day or the day after, I don't remember, a truck
pulled up. I didn't even know anyone in that town,
so it was weird and I was put off when
the guy called me over and told me he was
my neighbor and asked if I heard the shots. I
said yeah. He claimed it was his neighbor taking pot

(13:46):
shots at his house over a land dispute. He didn't
ask me to be a witness for him or anything,
just asked if I heard. Okay, seemed really odd to me.
I'd never met that guy before. And when I say neighbor,
I mean like five hundred meters to will kill a
meter out of sight. The guy saw my dog digging

(14:06):
somewhere unimportant, and all of a sudden he started trying
to tell her to not do that. He got out
of his truck and she was iffy of him, and
he said here, watch and called her over. He grabbed
her and tried to do the stupid fucking Cizar Chavez
dominance thing and holding the dog on their back thing
for really no fucking reason. She started yelping and I said, dude, stop.

(14:33):
Then he asked me whether I had any guns myself,
and I said no. He said he's a great dog trainer,
and he asked me to go over in Moe's lawn
and please ensure to bring your dog. In the strangest way,
just like that, please ensure you bring your dog. I
can't describe it, but his mannerisms and the way he

(14:55):
talked was just playing creepy, especially that line. He left
soon after, and I began thinking, Fuck, I just told
this guy not only that I heard the gun shots,
but that I'm unarmed. I mean, how did I even
know it was his neighbor like he claimed, and not
in fact, that this weird dude has shot someone at

(15:15):
his home and was trying to see who might have
heard or witnessed it. I wasn't going to his house,
not a fucking chance. It was a horrible feeling. But
pretty soon he showed up, asking why he was calling
and texting, asking why I gave him my number before
realizing how weird he was, But he was really adamant

(15:38):
that I go over to his house. Turns out the
guy was a total ALKI lost his wife, lost his job,
lost everything, and was in a very dangerous mental state.
He had nothing to lose. The small store owners in
town explained the guy to me. He was apparently the

(15:58):
most hated guy in the valley with a very bad reputation,
So at that point I was really freaked out. I
found it hard to sleep after that. I mean, in
a cabin in the woods, nobody nearby, they would hear
any commotion, ample angles for the place to be approached
from the woods, and just a can of bear spray

(16:20):
and a knife to protect me. And the guy knew
that I didn't have any guns. I mean, I'd be
kept up for hours listening at night for any movement outside,
as it was dead silent out there. Then one night,
in the middle of the night, my dog started to growl,

(16:40):
and then growled even more. I didn't hear anything, but
it didn't matter. Every room in that cabin had a window,
but the bathroom. I just got up, grabbed my knife
in bear spray, and locked myself in that fucking bathroom
for hours just listening. I think I eventually fell asleep there.

(17:01):
I don't think I've ever felt that kind of dread man.
I just pictured this lunatic sneaking up with a shotgun
to take me out for maybe having heard him murder
someone with a gun days earlier. Fuck man, it was
just awful. I moved, but unfortunately my new landlords were
equally creepy and even started trying to steal my dog,

(17:23):
even though they had three of their own. I mean literally,
I heard them discussing it, how they had to make
themselves the in crowd so that she'd want to be
with them in hand feeding her dog food when they
thought I wasn't looking. It must have just been the
small town thing, totally strange people in that town for
the most part. They went to market one morning, and

(17:45):
I packed up all my shit into my uninsured van
with no license, got my dog in and fucking bailed
on that town and never looked back. Deadly Watcher by
sand Dragon. My uncle built a house sat on some

(18:09):
acreage he has that is pretty far out in the woods.
There isn't another house within two miles of his at least,
and again most of it is woods and cow pastures.
His place is beautiful. He built it all by hand
and has a wonderful wrap around deck, perfect for family
get togethers. Oh one day we were all out there,

(18:32):
probably twenty adults and five or six kids, for a party.
It was one of those summer times when it was
blazing hot, but the light breeze was cool enough that
we didn't notice it. After a while. I'd been there
hanging out all day, when in the evening I was
asked to run into town and grab some more groceries.
So I packed up and headed out, got the groceries

(18:54):
and everything was fine. As I drove back, it was
getting darker, and it was at the time of year
when dark comes fast, so it was pitch black out
there when I finally arrived. As I pulled up, I
noticed something was sitting in front of my car, facing
the house. It wasn't disturbed by my headlights, but it

(19:16):
did glance back at me once. It was a fucking panther,
just chilling there watching the party. And as I sat
there for a second watching it, I noticed that it
had specifically placed itself near the edge where all the
kids were running around. After I had my headlights on

(19:38):
it for a minute or so, he kind of looked
back at me again, as if to say, okay, I
was caught. Oh well, and then it gave the most
human sounding sigh and just walked off into the woods.
I sat there for a bit before building myself up
to get out of my car, and then I went

(19:58):
into the party told everyone what I had just seen.
Twin Peaks in Mount Hood by Forsaken Hornet about three
years ago in September my friend I'll call her Agatha,

(20:19):
and I drove up to the southwestern base of Mount
Hood to view planets with her new telescope. We often
go to national forests for stargazing or night hikes, and
we're both experienced woodswomen. She's been a lifelong camper and
I'm a wilderness survival guide. We've both spent long periods
of time in the wilderness, and both of us have

(20:40):
had barren counters, cougar encounters, wolves, elk, moose, you name it.
I've also had my fair share of strange encounters with
other people in those forests, from stumbling upon occult rituals
to people living off grid, but those are all stories
on their own. All of this is to say that

(21:01):
neither of us spook easily and are very used to
the diverse sights and sounds of the forest. Agatha had
been to the spot we were heading to before. It's
a dispersed camp site off a medium use for a
service road. We wanted to go to this particular spot
because we knew it was high enough elevation that we'd
lose a lot of light pollution, but not so high

(21:23):
that we'd run into snow. It was a decent spot
for star gazing, with about a one hundred and fifty
foot diameter clearing that was mostly dirt and gravel. Though
Agatha had been there before, I never had, and I
wanted to drive a bit further up the mountain to
see if we could find a slightly less treed view.

(21:43):
So we drove another few minutes up the road. Along
the way, I spotted a tent about sixty feet off
the right side of the road at what looked like
another dispersed camp site. The odd thing was there wasn't
a vehicle parked at the site, just the tent. Another
odd thing was that it was pretty cold to be
camping in a standard two three seasoned cabin style tent.

(22:07):
Night temperatures that time of year at that elevation are
around thirty or forty degrees fahrenheit, and that night it
was about thirty six. When I pointed it out to Agatha,
she slowed down a bit to check it out. I
was concerned maybe some one had left the tent, and
if so, we could take it down and dispose of
it properly. So she slowed down to about five miles

(22:30):
an hour, and I briefly shone a light toward the tent,
but not directly on it in case some one was
in there sleeping. In the ten seconds or so it
took for us to slowly drive by, it looked like
maybe the tent wasn't fully zipped up, and I could
see through the mesh door. It also looked like it
was improperly assembled. We didn't think much more about it

(22:54):
and kept driving. We said we checked the tent out
fully to determine if it was a dumped item. On
her way back down, we drove maybe another one or
two minutes when the road narrowed severely as a curved
on an incline. We're both used to sudden changes like
that because four service roads are known to be wiy.
But for whatever reason, Agatha came to a full stop

(23:17):
before taking the curve and said, I don't think we
should go any further. I said, okay, Well why, she said,
I don't know, but I'm turning around and going to
the spot we originally came here for. I was slightly
concerned because she sounded a bit upset, but I chalked

(23:37):
it up to her just being excited to finally use
her new telescope. She reversed about fifty feet and turned
the truck around to head back to the clearing. As
we approached the spot where the tent was, I took
off my headlamp and handed it to Agatha so she
could shine it out her window on the left side
of the road toward the tent. The weird thing is

(23:59):
it seemed like it had moved thirty or fifty feet
down the road. It just didn't seem like it was
in the same spot as before. Once we saw it
to the left of the headlights, she came to a
full stop on the road right in front of it.
What was even creepier is that it now seemed to
be closer to the road than it was before. But

(24:19):
since I wasn't thinking too much about it the first
time around, I just assumed it was one of those
fallible eyewitness memory moments and let it go. But I
could only let that go for about five seconds. I
don't know what came over Agatha, but she decided to
shine the headlamp at full blast directly on the tent.
I said, whoa wait a minute. We still don't know

(24:42):
if there might be someone sleeping in there. But as
soon as I looked at the tent. I shut up.
I stared at it for about ten seconds before I said,
what the fuck are we looking at? Is that a tent?
Agatha said, yeah, I think so, it's just upside down.

(25:05):
I blinked my eyes a bunch, thinking maybe the cold
air had caused them to water and it was messing
with my vision. I stared at her for another five seconds,
and I don't know how else to explain this, but
it looked like I was staring at a Picasso painting
of a cabin style tent. I mean, nothing was where
it was supposed to be. I looked away for a
few moments, thinking I should have brought my glasses, and

(25:27):
I couldn't believe my night vision was suddenly so awful.
At that point, I noticed a feeling of uneasiness creeping
up on me, but I shrugged it off. I asked
Agatha if she saw anyone in the tent. She took
a few seconds to answer me and said, dude, to
be perfectly honest, I don't know what the fuck I'm seeing,

(25:49):
but yeah, I think I see someone's bare legs sticking
up in the air. My heart went straight to my
throat and I immediately thought, Oh, no, someone is in
fact inside, and they're either dead or dying of exposure.
Agatha whispered, what the fuck is that. I looked toward

(26:10):
the tent again, and for a split second, it almost
looked like there were, in fact someone's bare legs sticking up,
as if they were on a cot in the dead
bug position, with slightly bent knees. But this was through
the mesh part of the tent door, so I couldn't
make it out fully. I blinked my eyes again, because

(26:30):
for whatever reason, this damn tent was hard to look at,
and when I opened my eyes in just that millisecond
of blinking, the mesh door was closed and the legs
we thought we saw were gone. But the whole time
it still looked like a Picasso painting, and I started
to get a headache because it felt like my brain
couldn't reconcile what I had seen. Even though it was

(26:52):
a seemingly ordinary object, it was just so disjointed and
out of proportion and seemed to shift every time I blinked.
Agatha stared at it, mumbling what the fuck every few seconds,
when she suddenly shook her head, rolled up the window
and said, let's just go someone is probably sleeping in it.

(27:15):
I have no idea why she came to that conclusion
or why I went along with it, aside from that
it was the only reasonable explanation at the time. We
both experienced out of the ordinary things in the wilderness.
So while this was definitely strange and caused us both
to be on high alert, we didn't panic and we
rationalized the weirdness away. But of course that didn't last

(27:37):
long because this night was determined to be strange. We
left the tent behind and whoever may or may not
have been sleeping in it, and we pulled into the
gravel clearing about five minutes down the road. We both
put on our headlamps and scoped the area for trash
and critters. The first odd thing to happen at this

(27:58):
area is that while we were at the edge of
that clearing, Agatha almost fell to the ground on her face.
What's weird about that is the fact that she's an
avid outdoorswoman, lots of experience walking at night on and
off trails with or without a light, and never having
tripped or fallen before. About a minute later, the same

(28:19):
thing happened to me as I walked from the edge
of the clearing back to where we'd set up a
tart and blanket. I tripped and almost fell backwards. This
happened to both of us about a half a dozen
times more, tripping over nothing, I mean, even tripping over
our own feet. It almost felt like the ground wasn't
where it was supposed to be. Rationally, I could say

(28:44):
everyone has off days, and in my case, I hadn't
been there before, but Agatha had, and she was familiar
with the area. Plus I routinely visit new places many times,
and I don't recall ever tripping and stumbling like that
outside of treacherous terrain or creek walking. I don't know.
Make of that what you will. We brushed off the

(29:06):
weirdness and Agatha got about setting up her telescope. I
lay down on the tarball. She tried to get Jupiter
in view, and she spent maybe three minutes setting up
the telescope in about thirty minutes trying to lock it
on Jupiter. Every time she got it lined up in
the scope and took a moment to stand up straight,
or maybe three to five seconds, she'd bend down to

(29:27):
the eyepiece again and Jupiter would be gone. That whole time,
I was laying on the ground on a tarp with
a crocheted blanket draped over me, perfectly comfortable. I didn't
notice just how comfortable I was until she asked me
to come over and look through the scope to see
if I could keep Jupiter in sight. As soon as
I stood up, I noticed a temperature change from when

(29:49):
I had been lying down. It was suddenly way colder.
Not like a wave of cold air, the air was still.
It was like the temper mature on the ground was
fifteen or twenty degrees warmer than the ambient temperature. I
also couldn't keep a beat on Jupiter, and after another
five minutes of trying, we gave up and laid down

(30:11):
on the tarp for some star gazing. After chilling out
for a few minutes in silence, I realized that Agatha
didn't have a blanket, so I asked her if she'd
like to share mine. She said, no, thanks, I'm not cold.
That was odd because she is one of those people
who is always cold, so for her to decline a
blanket was just another check for the list of anomalies

(30:32):
of the night. I mentioned that to her, and I
also noticed a change in temperature from about ten to
twelve inches off the ground. I wish I had thought
to put my hand directly on the ground to feel
if it was cold or not, but at the time,
none of this was registering as a red flag or
something to pay much heed to. As I was staring

(30:52):
up at the sky, which was perfectly clear, I noticed
that it was split in two, running east to west.
The best way I could describe it is that there
was an invisible line demarcating half of the sky into
a northern and southern section. The northern side was somehow
lighter than the southern side. It almost looked like the

(31:12):
north side was affected by light pollution, whereas the south
was not. But it got even stranger. As soon as
I noticed the split sky phenomenon, I also noticed the
stars on either side were twinkling at different rates. As
soon as I noticed the stars, the split reversed. The
south was now lighter and the north darker. I pointed

(31:37):
it out to Agatha. She watched for a while and
confirmed she had seen the same thing happen. We chalked
it up to some unknown natural phenomenon, and I've yet
to get a solid answer of how that happened. It
wasn't a light pollution dome or a light dome of
any kind, because this demarcation was stark, not at all

(31:57):
diffused or fuzzy. The sun had said at least an
hour and a half earlier, so it wasn't a twilight
wedge either. It also couldn't have been due to antic
orpuscular rays because we were facing west. I would love
for a meteorologist to weigh in on this. Another ten
minutes passed, and I was so comfortable I felt like

(32:18):
I could fall asleep. In fact, I was starting to
close my eyes when Agatha suddenly sat up and shook me.
She said she saw a light coming from approximately where
the Picasso tent was, through the tree line to the southwest.
I didn't bother sitting up. I just turned my head
to look in that direction. I asked if she thought

(32:40):
it was a flashlight, and she said maybe, but it
seemed to be too high off the ground. I said
it probably was the person who was staying in that tent,
and maybe they just got back from a night hiker
or were going to the bathroom. She agreed and laid
back on the tarp again. Time passed and I lost
track of the minutes as I was starting to again,

(33:01):
but I guess it was anywhere from another ten to
twenty minutes. I was perfectly comfortable, lulled into a light
sleep and maybe even a mild hypnagogic state, when I
suddenly sat bolt upright. Agatha was still lying down and
appeared to have fallen asleep, and there was no noise.

(33:21):
Nothing discernible woke me up. I looked toward the tree
line to the southwest and saw a light. For a
split second, I was congratulating myself for having such sharp
senses that I could tell when someone was walking with
a flashlight that far away, But that faded quickly when
I noticed another light and another. I had one of

(33:44):
those moments where my mind couldn't piece together what I
was seeing and couldn't match into anything I had seen before.
There were a total of three lights or orbs. I
wasn't seeing beams of light emitting from a flashlight. I
was seeing orbs of light floating independently through the upper
half of the tree canopy toward us. They were maintaining

(34:07):
a triangular formation, but were rotating around one another. They
had a bluish hue, kind of like a cheap led
sun lamp. I couldn't say for certain how large they
were because I had no frame of reference aside from
the tree line, which was about fifty feet away from
where I was sitting. But the orbs were not directly

(34:28):
at the edge of the clearing. They seemed to be
much farther away, and I could tell they were coming
towards us as they appeared to be getting slightly larger
as I stared at them. I shook Agatha and pointed
toward the tree line. She turned her head in that
direction and shot up to her feet. She grabbed her telescope,

(34:49):
and I stood up and wadded up the tarp and blanket,
and we threw everything in the bed of her truck
without putting the telescope back in its case or anything,
and then we got in and floored it out of there.
I have never felt the kind of dread that I
felt on the mountain side that night. I was in
full fight or flight mode to such a high degree

(35:09):
I felt like I wanted to run while I was
in the truck. The panic was so awful that my
breathing was erratic, and my hands went numb for a
few minutes. We didn't speak until we've got fully out
of the forest and on to Highway twenty six. Once
we saw another car passing in the opposite direction, we
bought sided with relief and started in with a bunch

(35:32):
of what the focks. To this day, I don't have
any answers. It was such a bizarre mishmash of innocuous occurrences.
Each thing on its own was barely strange. But I
can't help to think that the temperature change, the ground
being walky, the Picasso tent, and the split sky were

(35:52):
somehow related to seeing those orbs. Then again, it's the
brain's job to try to make sense of everything, even
when there's nothing to make sense of. Our paniced reaction
and shared sense of dread was also very strange and
out of character for both of us. It was a sudden,
visceral reaction, and it felt like there had to be

(36:13):
something else at play to make us both react that way.
Hopefully someone has some insight on potential rational explanations. Otherwise,
I guess it's aliens. Nature is scarier than anything by anonymous.

(36:40):
I used to go backpacking all the time in the
mountains and have some good stories, But hands down, the
scariest thing I've ever encountered is lightning. My first real
experience with it was at Filmont in New Mexico. Great
backpacking area and lots of fun if you're a scout.
Not fun when it stole. My group was eating dinner

(37:02):
one night when lightning struck a tree about fifty feet
from us. It was unexpected. There were dark clouds, but
the sun was shining through still that this thing just
shredded the tree and all of us jumped dinner ended
up in the dirt. We did have a couple of
other close experiences during those two weeks, but that was

(37:23):
the closest. The second and most terrifying experience I've had
was when we were in King's Canyon, California, doing the
Ray Lakes Trail. One of the camp sites was by
a river and now it's prone to rain in the
Sierra Nevadas, and we were all at the bottom of
a tight granite valley that showed some signs of historical flooding.

(37:44):
Was not my ideal choice of a spot to sleep,
but it was an NPS sight and it was at
the end of our day at about two a m
I was awoken by a flash of light so bright
I swear I could see the tenth through my eyelids.
Before I could even think, the thunder roared so loudly
I thought the earth was tearing itself apart. It's hard

(38:08):
to accurately describe the sheer power and sound that comes
from being right next to a lightning strike. The night
didn't end there either. We were directly under the storm
and the lightning jest kept coming. The thunder never ceased
to roll, and the rain was torrential. The lightning was
so constant as well, you could almost see through the

(38:29):
walls of the tent into the forest around us. It
was like daylight out there. I thought I was going
to die that night, either from a lightning strike or
a flood if the river rose. The third experience was
in Switzerland. We were up in the Alps and got
caught in an open field and rocky area during a

(38:50):
descent as a storm rolled in. Again lightning strikes far
too close for comfort, and no place to shelter, we
were just squatting down and praying that we wouldn't get struck.
I mean an amazing trip, but that moment was not enjoyable.
I love watching lightning and rain from inside a cabin

(39:10):
or covered porch now, but if I'm outside and a
storm is coming, I've gotten this almost animalistic fear that
screams at me to get indoors. Lightning scares the living
shit out of me if I'm not covered. Human predators

(39:34):
by lazy couch days. When I was a kid around
eight or nine, my mom, grandma, brothers, and I went
camping at a small camp about two hours from the
town we lived in. We went there a lot, and
even had a particular campsite we had slowly built up
over the years. On this trip, we had my aunt

(39:54):
and uncle's dogs with us since they were doing military tours.
They were both well trained bird dogs, but usually really
calm and friendly. The first night on the trip, Star
started growling in the tent at about one in the morning.
My mom thought something was outside and investigated the dogs.

(40:16):
As she got out of the tent, Star and Ariel
would not let her move to the other edge of
the campsite, and both went into an attack position while
hurting my mom towards the car. That's also while keeping
themselves in front of the tent. By that point, we
were all up and with a group of kids under ten,
all freaking out for a reason she can't explain to

(40:40):
this day. My mother packed up camp and got us
all into the car to head home. After about ten
minutes out of the campsite, a car started following us,
and the dogs crawled their way into the back and
just started growling again. By that point, everyone was in
borderline panic mode, and my brother's were crying the entire

(41:01):
car ride home. As our town came into view, we
had to cross a huge bridge to drive in, and
the car was still following us. As a kid, you
make stories to yourself that nothing's wrong and that the
car behind you was just full of scared people too.
Yet as we started across the bridge, the car stopped,

(41:23):
turned around, and went speeding back the way we came.
We stopped at a gas station and everyone was near
meltown mode, and my mom went in to get cigarettes,
but Star would not let her back into the car
until she could see my mom clearly that in a
camping trip a few years later convinced me camping is

(41:47):
no longer my thing. Hey, gang, thanks for listening to

(42:07):
this episode. If you have a true scary story, of
any nature that you'd like me to narrate. Email it
to Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com
and I read them all. If you like what you've
heard and seen, and you're catching this on YouTube, give
the video of thumbs up, leave a comment. I'd like
to know what you thought of the stories. And if

(42:29):
you're not a subscriber, hey, why not subscribe? Tell a
friend about the channel. All that stuff does help out
with the algorithms. Follow me on social media, and if
you'd like to take a step further in supporting what
I'm doing, find a link in the description of my
Patreon page and consider getting yourself some Uncle Josh and
Campfire Crew merchandise. A link to my tea public storefront

(42:52):
is in the description as well. Everyone be excellent to
each other, and until next time, be wary of things
that go bump in the night. It could be anything
a ghost, a monster, or a guy next door.