Kinda out there in left field but have you guys ever seen or had anything weird happen to you while out in the woods or wherever?
The wife and I like watching these videos, interviews, and documentaries about people who claim to see weird stuff in the woods. Some claim that people have followed them, some claim to hear footsteps or voices around their tents, some claim to see strange animals/beasts, or claim to have been abducted etc etc. You get the idea. The really weird ones are the people that go randomly missing and are found 5-7-10 miles away from their last known place and are found alive and unharmed yet they have no clue how they got there.....
I'm not saying we believe or don't believe, as some of these are pretty wacky, but some of these are believable when you see the amount of fear that some of these people show while telling their stories.
Just wondering if any campfire members have witnessed or experienced anything "unexplainable". I keep an open mind about stuff. The world can be a strange place.
I had 4 separate experiences about 20 to 25 years ago on the same property which was roughly 200 acres in size.
The first experience happened near dark in the early fall while I was bow hunting for deer. I was sitting in my treestand looking up the mountain when I saw something large and dark in color moving down a very steep part of the mountain at a high rate of speed. It was roughly 2.5 times the size of most deer I saw in the area. I have never seen anything move so fast in the woods like that thing did. It moved in the direction I had to go to get to my vehicle. I didn't have a flash light and I only had my bow for protection. At the time, I thought that had to be a bear, right? I inched along scared too death listening for anything approaching. I finally made it back to my vehicle and I have never hunted with a bow since that day. I also gave up black powder rifle because I want more than one shot. It hasn't kept me out of the woods.
My second experience happened about 200 yards away from the first while deer hunting again. I had a rifle this time and I had hiked most of the way up the mountain. I stopped at a spot and sat on the ground where I had great visibility looking down below me and I sat and watched for maybe 45 minutes. As I stood to continue my hike up the mountain I heard a loud noise 30 feet behind me. It was the sound of something large running up the mountain behind me. As I tried to make sense of what was happening, I felt confused like my mind was missing something, almost like your punch drunk. I continued to hear something running up the mountain through the mountain laurel, but I couldn't see anything. Whatever was making that much noise should have been visible to me. I kept waiting to hear a deer "blow", but I never heard another sound. I went and looked behind me where the noise originated and I could clearly see where something had flattened the leaves where it sat watching me. It gave me the creeps to know something large was watching me from behind and never made a sound until I got up to move.
My third experience happened in the spring around spring gobbler season. I was driving up the tree cut road to the spot where I would shoot my rifles. I would go shooting up here weekly and I had my labrador retriever with me. She always enjoyed the trips up to the mountain and she would be so excited that she could barely stay in the truck. I would leave the window down and she would have her head out the window anxious to get out. Most of the time she would jump over me to get out of the truck because she loved it so much. This day was different. As we approached the area where I would set-up my portable shooting bench, I heard a loud noise up the mountain. I had the radio on so I couldn't quite make out the sound. I turned the radio down and stopped the truck. This time I heard a roar unlike anything I have ever heard. No human being could make a sound that loud. The roar was about 150 yards up the mountain in the next hollow (pronounced "holler" for the non-southerners) and sounded like it was angled away from me and slightly uphill. I remember thinking, "What the f*#% was that!" I sat and listened for 30 seconds to a minute and then opened the door of my truck to get out. I looked over at my dog and she was shaking uncontrollably and did not move from the truck seat. I called to her and she didn't pay attention to me. I grabbed her and tried to pull her out of the truck. She fought me with all she had to stay in the truck. I finally wrestled her out and when she was on the ground, she kept shaking and stumbling like a drunk would do. My mind was still trying to process what the hell was going on. I started to walk up the road in the direction of the sound. All of sudden this feeling of fear and dread came over me. It made me sick to my stomach. I remember thinking, "I am not afraid. Why do I feel afraid?" I looked back at my dog and thought, "Am I scared because she is scared?" The only other thing which scared her were thunderstorms and I thought to myself, "I don't get scared when she gets scared during a storm". I had a moment of clarity and I looked up the road and said in my mind, "What ever the f*#% is over there, you stay on your side and I will stay on mine. I have truck full of loaded guns and I am going to shoot them." In a few seconds the feeling of dread left me and I noticed my dog snapped out of it too. We spent a couple of hours shooting, but I never went over to where I heard the sound originate.
My fourth experience happened in the early fall before deer season. My wife and I and the lab mentioned in the previous experience were up the mountain next to the hunting cabin and 1/4 acre pond. The area around the pond and cabin had started to get overgrown with white pines and started to make visibility around it difficult. Plus there was an old logging road across the dam and the pines on it would not allow me to drive my truck across it anymore so I was cutting some of them down to open it up. As we finished, we became aware of something making a growling sound and pacing back and forth just out of eyesight in the pines. It was probably 40 yards away. This time the dog was growling, teeth showing, hair standing on end. I also got the feeling of all the hair on my body standing up. My wife was afraid too. The strange part for me, was the heavy foot steps and the breaking of large branches. It kept pacing back and forth like I would expect a human being to do protecting some imaginary line. It was so odd. What does that? My wife and I decided we needed to leave now, so we grabbed everything and got in the truck and left. We talked about it later and she thought it was weird, but we were not sure what to make of it.
Also during this time frame, I was walking the labrador retriever near a school close to my house. We were walking along the perimeter of the property when I stopped for a moment and to my surprise and large animal started to move in the brush behind my dog. I was only 15-20 feet from it. It's size would equal 4 of my dog. It was moving through this thick brush, vines, that a person could not walk through. Full of blackberry vines and honeysuckle. It pushed through it with ease the way a bulldozer would do. It was covered in black hair, but it wasn't thick and I could see it's skin and it was gray. The front end of this animal was huge and heavily muscled. The legs were muscular, but looked shorter and less bulky than the upper body. I could not see the head or what it was using to grip the ground to move. Within a couple of seconds it had cleared the brush and I quickly ran to the edge to see what it was. There as an opening just on the other side which would lead to houses and the interstate. When I looked over the brush I could not see anything. It was like it had disappeared and I could not understand where it could have gone. There was no way an animal that size you could get away without me seeing where it went to. I kept thinking it must be a bear, right? Its skin, its thin long hair, the power and speed at which it moved plus the disappearing act makes me wonder what I saw.
