Park Rangers, What's The Creepiest Thing You've Seen In The Forest? (r/AskReddit)

hikers Park Rangers offered it what is the scariest creepiest thing that you have seen in the woods serious a few years ago my brother and I were camping in Colorado he heard a twig snap somewhere nearby and he wakes me up we scan with our headlamps and see a huge pair of eyes staring at us through some willows I figured it must be a bear it kept staring at us for five minutes until we turned off the lights we were going to move camp back towards some other groups all of a sudden a massive moose comes charging out of the Willows luckily it veered off before it collided with our tent another time I was hiking a trail I hiked regularly with my dog but it was totally deserted because of some rain she was ahead of me maybe twenty yards when she comes to a dead stop and beelines it back down the trail completely ignoring my calls as I chase her I notice an unmistakable mountain lion print smart dog I was hiking in the Adirondacks with my ex on a trail that was a loop around a lake with one trailhead exit early spring so a lot of trail cleanup hadn't begun yet we are walking about halfway to check out this waterfall and I hear this rumbling that sounds like an animal stomping the ground towards us I then hear this bizarre rapidly increasing growl that sounds like what Hollywood uses for alien noises and freaking Bukit my boyfriend ex tells me to hold up but I am crapping myself I'm out of breath and refused to go back the way we entered the trail we have to march through this thick bog that was pulling our boots off to get through to the other side to exit the loop we get to the car and I'm crying at this point the previous day was spent vomiting from eating bad food next vacation we are going to a city I moved we had been to the Adirondacks for the past four vacations and honestly this experience beat me down years later I was listening to nature sounds on the internet and I hear that growl a chill went up my spine I learned that's a real thing it was a mating call of the ruffed grouse bearing its wings on its chest yup I freaked out BC of a frisky bird I was in archaeological field school living in a tent for six weeks of 7,500 feet and the closest paved road was ten miles away one night I woke to a huffing snorting kinda sound right outside my tent next thing I know whatever it was was bumping my head I froze for a second then on pure instinct I didn't overhead punch definitely felt contact whatever it was went away this was on u.s. Forest Service grazing land so it could have been the cow with insomnia but it could have been a mountain lion or black bear wasn't even tempted to go out and see what it was I preferred the safety of my tent the trail side color in Northern California late 70s hiking with a friend came across him at a rock outcropping on Mt Tim he gave off a very discomforting vibe and we didn't hang around we both independently recognized him when he was finally captured a few years later and his picture was in the paper if I'd been with my girlfriend we might not be alive he was a creepy-looking dude I was hiking in a National Forest with my wife and my dog the first couples miles of trail led to a waterfall and swimming hole so it was fairly well populated with people we decided to hike past the waterfall which involved a bit of a climb enough at least to keep most people from going past the waterfall we hiked another mile or two without seeing a single person this whole time my dog was having a great time happy to be in the woods and happy to walk 30 miles if we let her suddenly in a particularly dense part of the trail she stopped suddenly in stared straight ahead she absolutely would not move another inch forward we stopped and listened but couldn't hear or see anything unusual the dog though started whining and trying to pull us on the leash back up the trail towards the swimming hole I had never before or since seen my dog act this way but I believe she was legitimately afraid of whatever was ahead of us maybe there was a bear on the trail or a coyote or maybe a serial killer was hiding in the woods I'll never know because we listened to our dog and decided to get foe as fast as we could who knows maybe we avoided some gruesome death deep in the woods I worked as a tree planter in Northern Ontario living in temps in very remote parts of the forest like ours away from civilization only accessible by logging roads strangest was from a fellow planter who found a backpack in the middle of his area with shoes clothes the wallet with a school in and a film camera how it ended up there is a total mystery because this is no place for hiking or camping scariest for myself was waking up to my tent vestibule collapsed and a large bear claw rip which I apparently slept through as well as turning a corner to a large vole for 10 feet away and returning to a spot I'd planted about five minutes early at a fresh mama bear and cub prints realizing a bear family had sauntered behind me while my back was turned was very unsettling because you do not want a freak with the bear and her cubs Canadian wildlife is scary yo people constantly under arrest him at how big wolves are they are not just wild dogs those em are huge I went to have all sanctuary once and I was astounded my grandfather bred Mastiffs and it takes a lot to make me impressed with the size of a canine but holy crap wolves are big the most surreal experience I had was during an off trail hike in the Rockies Co I was extremely depressed and spending a day away from an awful X I wasn't really sure what my plan was but I fell on my butt threw ice into a shallow streamer I was crossing and just said frigate I'm not going back to my car well just near the top of a steep hill I almost stepped on some sort of leg bone I was like oh crap that's cool until about three feet away I saw several more limb bones and most offer spine between a couple mounds I didn't see fresh blood but was certain it to his regular territory for something that could freak me up I kind of froze and looked around me since I hadn't heard anything so far so decided to get a few pics and then slowly left down the hill about halfway down I turned back up the hill cause I figured I was overthinking it and I really didn't want to go home about five steps back up and I definitely heard some animal walking around at the top of the hill and I didn't stick around to see it I slipped in the water gain on my way out bears were just chillin out in our campsite in New Mexico in the middle of the night making sounds one random guy wasn't in our group literally just gets out grabs a stick and CH as his aim out while screaming man that was wild random guy was rushin surrounded by me heads in an Australian National Park at night with no signal they stopped us in our car at the gate maybe five of them hopped out and surrounded the car asked us if we knew where they could get any I had my big Becca BK knife by my side thankfully they left that's not a knife workin in a rain forest in SE Asia many years ago one of the things we did was trap moths at night you'd sit in front over a big white sheets with a lamp in front of it powered by a generator and then periodically go and see what insects had been attracted to the sheet incidentally the insects attracted frogs which attracted snakes which attracted bigger things due to the noise and light the trap was about a mile away from camp so you'd be there at 3:00 a.m. all alone in the middle of a jungle one cloudy night there wasn't much happening on the 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. shift I heard a rustle in the woods beside me this wasn't unusual but it was a bit bigger than I was used to hearing the rustle got closer and I started getting tense it got closer still and I was starting to think that I was going to get eaten by a tiger suddenly a disembodied face broke out of the treeline screaming in an unintelligible language well I practically shat myself screamed a little and the disembodied face disappeared back into the woods issuing high-pitched giggles it was only after my heart slowed that I realized one of the local Lumberjacks had given me a jump scare using a torch under their face for spooky lighting I wasn't even mad it was hilarious I'd be sue Opie was on a camping trip in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and we woke up in the middle of the night of this incredibly loud slapping to splash out in the middle of the lake sound carries really well across water our first fear was that someone was shooting at us and that was absolutely terrifying then we heard it again a bit closer and one of the guides realized it was a freaking beaver slapping its tail on the water before it dove below my last trip up there I was awoken from a midday nap by my buddies singsong girly screaming bear turns out we made camp in the middle of a berry patch and the bear was having a feast about ten feet from my head was camping with my Boy Scout troop at the time and woke up during the middle of the night to footsteps and breathing we got louder and more footsteps started my bunk mates were up to at this point then we start to hear huffing and animal noises turns out the field our campsite was that was in the middle of an apparent cow crossing had to be at least thirty of them walking by at once definitely a scary moment to wake up to in the middle of the night hearing a million footsteps and animal noises for your information cow pies everywhere the next morning oh I love pie a pack of dogs ran up on my wife and I while hiking out of the Grand Canyon at about 3 a.m. a very very dark outside her and I had headlamps we stopped they stopped all I saw was a bunch of glowing eyes and bushy-tailed silhouettes after a beat I realized they were working dogs for the reservation so I just went he I poppers in the same voice I use from my dog and they immediately went on their way ended up not being dangerous really but I almost shat myself I was camping at a BLM campground on the Navajo reservation near a little town I was grilling a steak and just hanging out when a pack of reservation dogs showed up I threw another steak on the grill and shared it with them and they hung out for hours all real friendly I went running through a trail near my house one afternoon headphones in under my mind elsewhere just because I knew the path really well I came around a bend and through the gap in the trees about 20 feet in front of me I locked eyes with a dead and rotting deer somehow it was postured in a way that made it look as though the corpse were staring through me I turned around and bolted out as fast as I possibly could you should watch the movie the ritual a sleeping feral hog with piglets god I hope you booked it away from there my dad was stuck on the roof off his you´d because of a pee off pig once it was scary because I was locked inside the car looking at it I'm not a Ranger but I've hiked parts of the Appalachians rail this occurred in West Virginia I believe happened about eight years ago was hiking with a group we spread out naturally based on hiking speed I was in the middle east group of four of us and one person had to stop to pull the tick off other to one leader stayed with them but I decided to hike on a headland see if I could catch up with the lead group Viet is extremely well marked with white blazes so I wasn't worried about getting lost I knew the next landmark was an old logging road and sure enough I hit it about half a mile later I decided I should wait for the rest of the group to catch up so while waiting I hiked a bit down the old overgrown road which ran perpendicular to the trail there was a low stone wall along one side and I was strolling along it checking for anything interesting like artifacts and stuff when it was like I crossed an invisible line all of a sudden it was like sound cut off no birds or insects called when seconds ago there had been multiple birds singing the even leaves on the trees around me stopped rustling it was just this sudden unnatural deafening silence for whatever reason I took a few more hesitant steps forward until I hit this invisible wall it was like suddenly I was barraged by this feeling I can only describe it as intense and welcome as if I had entered the house of someone I knew hated me but multiplied by about 100 all the hairs on my body stood straight up I stopped dead in my tracks the feeling was so strong that I didn't even want to turn my back I couldn't see anything down the road threatening or otherwise that would give me this feeling but I knew I had to leave immediately I just knew I was not meant to be there and if I stayed something bad would happen so I walked backwards slowly never turning away from the road and trying really hard not to even blink finally I crossed that invisible line again and I could hear the birds singing in the leaves rustling I didn't turn around until I heard the leader I left earlier asking me if there was anything cool down the road I was like nope let's keep going looking back I figure it was a bear or cougar just out of sight that my instincts managed to pick up on but at the time dang it just felt frickin creepy and almost paranormal I was working as a remote mountain top microwave radio site near Prince Rupert BC in January the road to the site was impassable even by snowcat you - deep snowdrifts I had to be dropped off by heli in the morning and get picked up at end of day the building was small single-story maybe 30 X 40 featuring windowless with a metal front door I'm puttering away with music on but otherwise not making a lot of noise when there is a knock on the door I thought it a bit odd someone else would be up here with me but go answer the door nobody there I go out and look around nope nothing there no prints or tracks I figured maybe some ice had fallen and made a knocking sound go back inside and resume what I was doing a couple minutes later there is a knocking on the door again but longer-duration this time I opened the door nobody I go out and look around nothing go back to work a minute later knocking again this time it sounds like someone is angrily pounding on the door to be let in this time I opened the door with my crowbar in hand there was no doubt someone was there open the door nobody WTF step out and look around no sign of anyone again I get the feeling somebody is watching me I'm peering into the bush around me and see nothing something compelled me to look behind me and that's when I met the amused gaze of a raven perched on the roof edge centered above the front door they scooped a happy rock rock rock and flapped off to the treeline butthole the silhouette of a massive humanoid figure round head no snout at dusk moving through the foliage at ridiculous speed it was extremely loud branches swinging sticks snapping instinctively I fled by foot even though it wasn't coming in my direction even left my ATV behind in the this was driven back later with others to retrieve it - never saw it again still don't know what it was scariest was in the back country in the Canadian Rockies about a two-hour hike on and my friend and I each had a dog on leash all around us and so close it made me jump at least four wolf started howling it was really cool but I was a bit concerned about our dogs never did see the wolves but they howled again though not from this close when we walked back a few hours later I've had a similar moment when a large at least 12 murder of crows was swooping all around and passed me from tree to tree after I tested my new crow call I had also scattered food for them so I was pretty excited to be so close to my favorite animals but a little concerned I said something offensive recently walked across a deer leg nothing had decomposed yet so I know it must have been killed recently didn't see any other parts of it quotas and cougars are known to be around the area just kept close with the dogs and left back home as it was a trail near the house and other time was leaving a trail due to thunder and lightning rolling in was taking some photos off trail of a river and had to crawl through some bushes back onto the trail out of the bush I realized I'm face-to-face with a big bad male moose I mean I knew these guys were big but holy crap we stared each other in the eyes for a good minute before he continued to keep eating and move on down the trail at his own pace was grabbing around a tree the whole time that was climb oblique a see charged really wish I got some pictures but the rain was starting to come down quick and didn't want to risk breaking the camera there's a video of a moose running next to a car SUV and it's easily taller according to Google their average height can go up to 7 featuring tall but I know for a face big bull moose can be bigger they're terrifying huge I like to call em the hippos of Canada cause they can be fricking mean - park ranger here hope I'm not too late to the game and someone can enjoy this there's plenty of odd things but the scariest thing I've encountered tired was working at a National Wildlife Refuge that was normally US Army Labs soldier R&D site there was about 10 years worth of cleanup of random things like barbed wire barricades before it open to the public in the early 2000s if you aren't familiar with the National Wildlife Refuge System you're not allowed to leave the trails well as a ranger I often need to one time when I get deep into the woods a considerable distance from any trail I see a bunch of figures in the distance and my stomach drops could they be hunters are they armed I wait and they don't move I announce myself and proceeded on the figures there were about 6 badly burned mannequins in military uniforms just standing there it was a weird thing to stumble upon alone and I felt shivers later I dug deeper into the matter and found out that they were part of flame retardant fabric tests go fig that's just one I found a half-eaten person Quietus and busted her purse ich head 4th of July party - not while hiking but I was fishing on the pond on my grandparents property in West Virginia it's maybe a quarter mile down the hill from the house basically barely within sight it is backed up to an open field between it in the house and surrounded by thick forest so I was sitting on the right side of Tuesday little dock fishing and after about 2 hours of near silence I heard something rustling in the woods on the left side of the pond I smiled and thought oh it's probably a bear sort of joking to myself I look over to see that I was wrong it was three bears a mammal and two Cubs just walking along the edge of the pond towards me in the dock about 20 feet away not believing my eyes I was thinking who will who will oh crap this might be a good day to die having not moved since their appearance and remembering not to panic I planned my options I knew not to run in that with a black bear you can usually scare it off by yelling and looking big but I also knew that nine times out of ten if Cubs were there you were all but dead the plans were probably shot and you were about to get fubar the Bears got closer and finally I decided I'd rather see if I could scare them off with them 20-ish feet away instead of two feet away slowly with my back still to them I slowly got on my feet and started standing halfway up I heard them running nearly pee myself I swung around all three belted off into the woods I stood still for a little bit still on edge then I started walking then sprinting back to the house laughing maniacally and thanking God out loud for not letting me die today then I went and told my family on the porch purposefully in this order that I caught four fish all about 14 inches and again I saw a bear I was walking with my family in the woods above our house and our little dachshund puppy was sprinting up and down the trail between us having the time of her life after a while she caught the scent of something and shot off the trail into the undergrowth we called for her but her interest was fixed on something away from the path through the undergrowth after squeezing past some trees and bushes I followed her to a rocky overhang she was barking and barking at something laying in the soft dirt at first I thought it was a bundle of half-buried clothes then I saw the patch of blonde hair sticking out the soil at one end and realized what I was looking at there had been a lot of rain recently and it had washed some of the soil away from a recently dug shallow grave freaked out I grabbed my dog and backed up back to the trail after a much faster hike home the rest of the morning was spent talking to the police then talking to homicide I never found out what happened a bear ripped into one of our attempts to try to get to some food before it left no one was hurt but really scary I was headed up to a shooting spot with two of my brothers an old quarry we had been to several times that is located several miles up a logging road in a National Forest every time we had been there before it had been totally empty nothing other than a little scattered trash and old shell casings to indicate human presence but not this time as we round the corner into the quarry we see that a dozen or so ratty rusted RVs and a couple of large temps have been set up in a circle at the far end of the quarry a portable stage had been set up beneath the tallest rock face forming the top of the circle on the stage was a large piece of charred wood may have been a cross though it was burned down pretty far and hard to tell at this point myself and my two brothers each have a handgun on our hips and there is quite the Arsenal in the back of our SUV none of that mattered or gave us an iota of comfort I whip the car around as quick as I could to begin no ping the Frick right out of there before I could finish turning a small child walked up to the car from one of the tents against my better judgment I cracked the window my dad says nobody should be here the kid says we're just leaving I managed to respond the second I closed my mouth a gravelly slurred voice roared from the same tent the kid came from I told you not to talk to the frickin cops I drove quicker than was advisable the way back to the highway and needless to say we haven't visited that particular spot since then nothing like loosing a good shooting spot normally it's du développement not crazy hillbillies moving in and taking up residency in tents I was on a 50 mile hike with my friends and we were fairly separated a group of two about five minutes up a group of around five including me behind them and a group of about seven five to ten minutes behind us we were hiking the mountains where there was snow and being the Great Northwest animals no big deal we had bear spray if something went south my group reached the snow and was immediately blown away by massive cougar paw prints in it barely smaller than my hand if at all I'm a big guy so my hands UNT's mauled by any means now this was cool and a tiny bit frightening but whatever there are big Cougars nearby we knew that already the truly terrifying thing is that the pair five or so minutes ahead of us were also watching the ground and reported seeing no such pawprints meaning a big butt cougar showed up between the time of my two friends and me reaching that point when I was nine my parents sisters and I had went camping in a state park in southern Minnesota it was really late at night and we were getting ready to go to bed I was looking into the darkness for a while because I am absolutely terrified of the dark I saw the shadow the size of the crawling four year old run into bushes that were about ten feet away that scared the crap out of me and it took me approximately an hour to sleep I was jumping at every little noise there was I am still not happy probably just a fox or a [ __ ] maybe a big possum I used to do a crap ton of camping but one night still early on I was up with two friends in the middle of the night just hanging out in a field next to the campsite looking at the stars in the almost full moon it was so bright outside it was almost like day when suddenly I notice a faint whisper I thought it was someone from camp but no it came from the other direction we all shut up and listen to the faintest of all hey iiiii rr2 which we follow across a field away from the camp the whisper grew louder but only ever so slightly until we came across a road across the road was a fenced-in area but it was a pretty crappy fence easily crossed on the other side log the fences was a small woods the trees were spaced pretty far apart from each other there and despite the bright moon it was completely pitch black in those trees you could barely see past the first few rows and now the voice was much louder but still as if someone trying to whisper a voice that sounded like a little girl come play I I are no women were with us on this trip no girls just the sounds of a little girl calling out to us in pitch darkness to play at 1:00 in the morning we decided not to investigate further in around 2005 a friend and I were walking endorser through a small woodland it was snowing and my friend who was slightly chubby had fallen in a muddy stream trying to jump over it hilarious we had been walking for a couple hours when we saw something on a tree so we approached it was a dis head it had been impaled on a small branch protruding from the tree the branch went into the disma canned out on her I was chilling around a campfire at my friend's house who lives in the country his house butts up to the woods super quiet night we were all kind of zoned out staring into the fire when these absolutely horrifying screams came from the woods it was sounded like was less than 50 yards away it sounded like a dog being eating alive yelping in pain over and over it lasted a good 60 seconds and then just stopped just agonizing screams piercing the silence I still hear it in my head something died in the woods that night I don't know what it was and I don't know what killed it we called it a night and went inside after that probably a rabbit they scream pretty loud foxes too their mating calls sound like a woman screaming like she's being murdered while hiking yesterday me and four other friends were at a split in the trail and consulting a picture of the trail guide on the phone to make sure we went the right way we were practicing carrying backpacking packs with us and one of my friends was getting tired so she and another dude were near the back she starts to hear a creaky violin sound start playing she looks back and Sprint's ahead leaving the other guy in the dust he catches up and our group moves to the sides of the path for this new visitor he was an older guy I'm told who had a hoodie on in the hood up and the strings pulled real tight so you could barely see his face I actually didn't even see his face he was running while hunchbacked while playing the violin while holding it straight up and down and the sound it played was on tuned but still creaky sounding he ended up running through one split of the path and my group luckily was going on the other split of the path and we didn't see him again TLDR while hiking an old guy playing the violin vertically came running while hunched back behind our group and went off a trail split Rumplestiltskin this was a little over a year and a half ago when there was a massive forest fire in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon Washington the Oregon side was ablaze so my friend and I decided rather stupidly to go to one of our favorite peaks on the Washington side to observe the flames after dark we march up the trail for a little bit as the Sun slowly goes down and eventually we're hiking in complete darkness with nothing but headlamps then randomly out of the pure darkness we hear the sound of some animal I assume it was an elk screech loud as all heck it must have been no more than 10 15 yards away from us and we had no idea was there then we hear it tear off into the woods we both kind of just looked at each other in confusion and laughed it off still was a good scare by the elk though also seeing some of the most beautiful forested area in Oregon burned down was scary too I was living in Portland at the time and I had to evacuate because of all the smoke I miss hiking some of the trails that were compromised after the fire I work on a USFS trail crew and the scariest thing I've ever experienced was just a night in the backcountry we had a big 50,000 acre fire the year before so we were out clearing trail with cross cuts in the wilderness area in our district and we made it to night three of our trip had crazy strong winds like upwards of 40 miles per hour gusts and could hear trees crashing down all over I was in a safe spot with zero burned trees down but some of the folks on my crew were being pretty darn stupid and said their tents up next to some pretty suspect trees nothing ended up happening to anything close to us but I was up all night long wandering and waiting for anything to happen I live in a valley on the edge of the city and the hills around me were used as commercial plantations for growing pine trees I wasn't very far from my home but the trees and undergrowth were thick enough that I couldn't see the rest of the valley so it had this eerie feeling to it I quite like the quiet and listening to the sound of the wind through the pines most of them were destroyed in a storm in Easter 2013 quite surreal watching 60 featuring pine trees being snapped in half a dozen or so at a time I would do a circuit through then that would take me about an hour and a half to two hours to complete although what a pinch I could do it in an hour the scariest thing I experienced would have been when a dairy cow came crashing through the underbrush in front of me a cow might not sound like the worst thing that could happen but I heard they can be pretty aggressive and I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of what if it charged the creepiest things I experienced came before and after the storm on more than one occasion I had this feeling that I was being watched in the forest I would stop and listen for a few minutes and see nor hear anything it would disappear after a short while another occasion I found a dead pig next to a dirt road on the edge of the forest curled up like a dog or cat after the storm there were few patches of thick undergrowth that remained although while walking through one of them my dog kept staring up the hill beside me and would whimper she'd also walk right beside me which was unusual as she was always a minimum of five or six meters ahead on the track of her led but for what it's worth I came across a large wooden crate similar to the ones hunters and farmers have on the back of their Utes to keep dogs in atop a flat part of the dirt road on the opposite side of the valley there were a couple of tied up plastic bags next to it and it smelled of rotting flesh disappeared after a few days if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now [Music]

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Keywords: scariest, scary, scary woods, scary woods videos, scary woods stories, scary wood encounter, scariest camping stories, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, /r, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub

Id: HYHJOdDLmeA

Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020