Creepy Camping Stories

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. We were about 12 miles down a good sized path when we came upon a beautiful lake. It was crystal blue clear water, truly amazing. So we decided to strip down to our boxers and go for a swim after our long hot hike. It was beginning to get dark and we kept swimming. We were going to set up camp by the lake and stay the night. As we were swimming my friend Ron was sure that he saw someone move along the bank out of the corner of his eye, but as he turned to look, there was nothing there. He told us he thought he had seen someone but we stopped to look around for a few minutes and there was nothing to be seen. After a while we got out of the water and set up camp. As the night approached, we ate some food and settled down to watch the night sky. After about a half hour, Ron got up on an elbow and asked us, “Did you hear that?” We did not hear anything and he sat up peering into the night. “It sounds like a baby crying in the lake. You don’t hear it?” At this point he stood up and started walking toward the lakeside. Before we knew it he had just jumped in the water and began to swim with all his clothes on. We ran to the edge of the water and called his name, but we didn’t see him anymore; the water was still. Then Ron jumped up from the water and screamed for help. We wadded out and jumped in to get him. He was so scared he almost dragged us down, but luckily it was very close to the shallow edge of the lake. He was babbling about something grabbing him from under that water, something was pulling him down.

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. All the way up there my father was telling me creepy stories. One of the stories was about the trail that we were about to hike on, it involved a little boy and his dog who were running on the trail, and the boy was following the dog. The dog ends up leaping off the edge of a cliff because it's full on stupid and it wasn't watching where it was tearing up the trail. The kid follows, not paying attention either and both die. I was scared to death because I did that with my dog, I never pay attention to where we are going. I think he knows where he is going. It scares me to death when he tells it. I can see myself as the boy. I had my dog with me and I kept looking at it wondering if it was that stupid.  As we continue on, he tells other stories and I forget about that one.  We get to the trails and my father and I go ahead of my mom and sister with my dog. The path was curvy with a ledge that gradually got steeper. We were getting way ahead of mom and sis so my dad waited for them; I take off running with my dog. The backpack made it hard to run and I held my walking stick with both hands.

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.