Summer vacation is always a fun time to get out and do
things that you have wanted to do all winter long, such as swimming, hiking, or
boating. During the good weather we travel to places we have wanted to see, or
like a lot of us, we go camping.
When in the deep woods you are separated from civilization.
Many times you can’t even get your cell phone to get a signal. You are isolated
from everything; it is just you and the wilderness. Many times that can be
alarming or frightening. How many horror
tales and movies take place in an isolated spot in the woods?
Sometimes we actually do have unexplained or seemingly
supernatural things happen to us while we are in the middle of nowhere. Here
are a few sent in by readers and others that I have stumbled upon over the last
few years.
“My
three friends and I were camping in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park
At this point we were just ticked at Ron.
We had not heard anything like a baby and wondered what had snapped in his
head. He sat there kind of out of it for a while and then slowly stood up and
began to change into dry clothes. After that he crawled into his tent and quickly
went to sleep. My other friend and I just sat there really creeped out. After a
few hours we lay down as well and drifted off into sleep. Sometime in the
evening I awoke to hear a rustling in the bushes, and when I got up our bags
had been opened and the food was thrown all over the ground. For me that was
it. Somebody was out there messing with us. So I got up the guys and we walked
to the next big campground on the trail, it took us all night, but there was no
way I was staying anywhere near the lake and we wanted to be close to other
people. Ron did not remember going in the water. But we did notice claw marks
on his leg when we looked at it in good light. It looked like three distinct
scratches and red marks like a three fingered hand had grabbed him. This was
the freakiest thing I have ever experienced!”
Although this person’s experience took
place in Yellowstone , the phenomenon sounds a lot like the Native American legend of
the “Water Babies”. These supernatural entities would dwell in springs and
lakes. They were dwarfish with old wrinkled bodies and long thick black hair.
They were harbingers of death and doom; just hearing them could kill you. But
if you lived they would attempt to drag you down into the water to drown you.
They are the spiritual cousins to the Spanish Southwest’s La Llorona,
or Weeping Woman. Instead of being small, the weeping woman was a tall thin
beautiful woman with long black hair. She also liked to drown people, but her
prey of choice was young babies.
Next,
“When I was 9 years old my family went hiking
up to Mystic Lake
Suddenly I hear a girl’s voice right
behind me, calling my name. I was startled! I thought it was my sister catching
up with me. So I look back for just a split second and bam I hit a tree root
and go flying off the trail and off the cliff. The only reason I'm not falling
to my death is because of the walking stick getting stuck in rocks and it loops
around my hand. I am dangling there and get some footing, but there is no way
to get up. I start crying and calling out for help. My dog wasn’t stupid; he
was at the edge barking his head off. Dad appears and pulls me up. He is very
upset.
Later on that night I asked my sister why
she yelled at me. My sister tells me that she didn’t yell and we get into a
fight. My mom comes over and tells us to stop, she was walking with my sister
and my sister never yelled my name.
I spent the rest of our camping trip scared to death over
ghost boy yelling my name. Honestly I don't know whether I just imagined it or
anything even happened, but it really freaked me out.”
Was that a ghost boy looking to kill someone? I am always
curious of such stories- why would the dead kill? Wouldn’t the ones they kill
also look for revenge? That is not good afterlife planning.
Next, something that I can really relate to:
“Shortly after turning 17, I was visiting my uncle and 3
cousins in Tennessee . My uncle
had a rather large property that was connected to some "no-mans-land"
as they called it, so we took 2 ATVs out for a spin on the back trails with the
intention to camp overnight. We kept hearing this weird sound, like an elk
bugling, but no such animals lived there. After the sun had set, we set up camp
against the ATVs and had a campfire going, when a thick fog suddenly rolled in.
With it we heard yelping coyotes and such, and one of my cousins who had a
run-in with a starving coyote got scared so I volunteered to head back to my
uncles place with him while the other two stayed out camping. We hopped on an
ATV and made our way home, but I guess we became disoriented by the fog and my
cousin could no longer identify the trail. We try backtracking, but it sounded
like the coyotes were getting closer so my cousin started flipping totally out.
We also began to hear the bugling from before, which became more panicked and
more frequent, and the coyotes sounded pretty riled up. We kept seeing
reflections of eyes in the headlights through the fog, but never the coyote
itself. My cousin is flipping crazy at this point and doesn't know what to do,
but we keep driving. He suddenly remembered his dad's advice and began to
follow the moon to get back home, when suddenly some massive, shaggy creature
burst across the trail. It must've been around 9 feet at the shoulder and it
made this bugling shriek because we nearly hit it with the ATV. My cousin books
it and takes a sudden right and we find ourselves back on his property. We told
my uncle and he says he heard the bugling and that it was probably a bear, but
we didn't know what to believe.”
Sasquatch?
Lastly,
“My good friend invited me camping one Thursday afternoon. My
Mom and Dad were grateful to get rid of me, I was 14 and they were always
complaining about how I was always playing video games. I was just as excited
to get away from them at the time. So my friend and his parents headed to the
deep woods of the Alleghany forest. It took hours to get there; it was a family
camping site that looked really great. Hills and woods, we were in a little
valley.
We played around in the woods as his Mom and Dad set up
camp. There was an old trail that was sort of grown over. I remember getting
covered with prickers all up and down my pants. It took me a half hour to get
them out when I got back to camp. Anyways, we came upon a patch of trees by the
side of the trail that had old trees. It looked like the bark had been burned
off the bark from the bottom three to five feet of the whole bunch of them. We
also noticed a big pit in the ground near the trees that looked blackened too,
so we investigated it. In the pit were all kinds of junk, pots and plates all
cracked and burned. But what was weird is that there was what looked like
burned clothing pieces all along the edge, kind of scattered. It was flowery
with lace on some of the edges. We got spooked and headed back to camp.
My friend’s parents had fixed up the camp that put their van
across the road, sort of blocking it. The tent for my friend and I was pointing
away from it with the opening facing away from the van. Sort of like a T. We
all stayed up around the campfire late and then the parents went to bed in the
van and we went into the tent. We were wired and decided to stay up as late as
we could and pull an all nighter. Way into the night we started telling each
other ghost stories and after a while we heard someone walking around the
outside of the tent. We ignored it, thinking it was his parents going off to go
to the bathroom in the woods or make sure the fire was out. The footsteps
stopped and a figure of what looked like a girl stood on my side of the tent.
My friend stared with a pale complexion on his face as this 'person' leaned
into the fabric of the tent so you could make out some of their facial
appearance. The face began to chew and then it looked like it was smiling,
except that a little girls face shouldn’t be able to be making that sort of
smile, it was really deformed and grotesque. It reminded me of the old music
video for Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” where the woman’s mouth stretches
across her face. It then began to gurgle and try to talk and it said something,
I couldn’t tell what, but then it spoke
and all we heard was "Help me" in a whispering female voice. I
actually really pooped myself. No kidding. My friend screamed and we bailed out
of the tent to the van to sleep in there for the rest of the night. I tried to
look through the darkness and I noticed a girl standing perfectly straight by a
water pump. She was all grey and wore a tattered dress. I couldn't believe my
eyes. I was sure I saw a white edge on the dress so I am sure it was the same
material we saw around the burnt hole. It was amazing that we did not wake his
parents. I couldn't sleep all that much and
I tried to look outside, but all I could see was through the small window. I
kept waiting for that face to pop up like a horror movie and kill us all. My
friend fell asleep after a few hours but I stayed awake until dawn. Only one
time did I see something in the window, it was a shadow moving quickly around.
I could have stood up to look out, but I knew if I saw it, that little demon
girl would get us for sure. I never went camping with that family again,
although I still go camping. But now I always come armed with some weapon.”
That one sounds like a good horror movie! Was it some weird
apparition or someone else who was camping in the same area? I wonder what was
in that burned pit?
I received a few other stories as well and perhaps I will
share them at a later time. Isn’t it curious how many face the demonic or evil
entities in the middle of the woods? It makes you wonder why it happens. Cursed
ground? I have heard many Missionary stories like the ones we just read where
the Missionary battles the darkness in the name of Christ and it flees. It
would seem that the dark corners of the world are, well…really DARK.
I guess you really never know
what you will encounter in the woods during summer.
