Wierd things you have seen in the woods.

Back in the early 80s I was night fishing on the clinch River in upper East Tennessee. Nothing around for miles, not even farm houses. My buddy decides to go get some beer from the car.

I could not talk him out of it and felt safer staying there alone than walking 3/4 mile in the pitch dark.

He was gone about 10 minutes when I got a hit and started pulling in what I was sure was a large fish. I got it to the water edge and walked down to get it.

Well to my surprise it was WALKING up to meet me. What I saw was not a fish, it looked like a 6 foot long snake with a huge head and 4 legs. It was hissing and spitting some white foamy stuff. Somehow it spat the hook out but was still coming at me and was not happy.

I made it to the car about the same time as my buddy who had left long before.

Turns out it was some type Salamander that was pretty common in that part of the river. When I heard people talk about them I pictured small lizards not friggin sea monsters.

I know what I WANT to see in the woods.

Here is another classic thread that is relevant:

Thread: how come when we were little, there were ALWAYS porn mags in the woods?

Theres a mountain close to my house thats with in a state park and I climb it fairly often. It has a north trail and a west summit trail. This particular morning I parked on the west side and climbed up, then down the other side. So I needed to hike the base trail to get back to my car. The mountain trails are full of people but you hardly even meet up with anyone on the base trail. The path back to the other side where my car was parked was about 3 miles total through thick woods. So I'm walking along enjoying myself immensely, as it was a beautiful sunny day, about 75 degrees just absolutely perfect weather. Im at the half way point and stop to pull my water bottle out of my pack, after putting it back I start walking again and I can see someone on the trail ahead of me coming towards me. I couldn't see them very well because of trees and brush...but as they get closer I can see that its a guy, probably around 20 years old or so. Nothing weird about that except that he is dressed head to toe in rain gear and theres a small axe in his left hand dangling at his side. I was like wtf! I try to act cool and say hi to him. He didn't respond, and seemed to not even see me. As he passes me he stares straight ahead never once acknowledging me even thought I passed within inches of him on this very narrow trail. I was totally freaked out because we were in the middle of the woods and I'm a mile from my car. I keep walking scared shitless that he is actually following me and not headed on down the trail in the opposite direction. I finally worked up the nerve to look behind me and he is no where in sight thank God. I started running as fast as I could down the path. There are all kind of rocks and tree roots and shit on the path and I end up catching my toe and going down hard. I was thinking this is just like a horror movie where the stupid girl falls and gets murdered...I get up and take off running again and don't stop until I reach the parking lot. There was a ranger in the lot and I told him about the guy. He thought it was very strange. He had been sitting in the parking lot for an hour in full view of the trail head and said he hadn't seen the guy get on the trail, but he could have come through the woods, or come off the Ozark trail which ties in to the base trail. I never did find out any more about this. But I NEVER walk the base trail alone any more.

MOSquatch

search for Michigan River - you will find it.

Hmmm, let's see... here's what I can remember:

an old nasty mattress
random singular gravestones
clothes with shoes
clothes without shoes
shoes without clothes
a pile of old moldy, dirty baby dolls with their hair all chopped off and their eyes gouged out (yeah that was eerie af)
bones of what looked like a whole cow
a random refridgerator with nothing else nearby in any direction
and porn mags, naturally

oh and drug paraphenalia once, the intravenous sort and a random car bench seat - it was green with black

Last Edited by woowoochic on 01/19/2017 10:37 PM

I've got crazier stories but those will have to wait for another time

When I was about 11 or 12, I went camping with my cousin of equalish age in the woods on my familys land up in northern wisconsin. Probably a few hundred yards away from the house.

Anyways, our campsite is at the top of this huge hill/clearing which at the bottom is surrounded by woods, we are having a fire with weenies and smores, and for fun we start trying to freak ourselves out and shine our flashlights into the woods, see if we catch anything in our beams. Well, we did, a bunch of eyes, some blinking and turning away and some looking back, but distinct.

Its very strange to think of now but I don't know why they didn't scare us much. We figured they were a pack of wolves but were totally at peace with the idea. I had seen wolves in the forest before and had a respect of wildlife, I wasn't afraid. So it wasn't that big of a deal. Might sound crazy but that's the truth.

That kind of leaves our mind, we get to being slap happy goofy kids, tire ourselves out, and we decide its time to get to bed. So we are laying in the tent for a while, almost asleep, its been 15 or 20 minutes of drifting silence, when we become aware of what sounds like a large animal nearing the site. The fire is still going a little bit.

I've camped a bunch of times and have heard footsteps, raccoons, whatever. You just get used to it I guess. But this time, the hulking presence was impossible to shake off. We both became immediately aware of it. My cousin and I at this point were aware of the both of us being EXTREMELY freaked out.

That level of fear was nothing compared to when we soon heard this roaring noise. It was very, very close to the tent. It sounded like a bear, but also kind of like what I've heard in later years are supposed to be sasquatch vocalizations. Well whatever it was, we both definitely heard it , scared stiff, hairs on our necks standing straight up. We were almost crying, praying to god to protect us, but still, totally silent, so freaked out, not wanting to breathe! We mustve waited like that for 20 minutes or more and the were probably the longest 20 minutes of my life up to that point

Then we mutually decided, since it had been quiet long enough, to get out of the tent and book it top speed back to the house, every man for himself. We took off in our underwear running on the wet grass with our shoes not even tied screaming at the top of our lungs and running as fast as we possibly could until getting back to the house! Never camped out there again!

Some friends and I stumbled across some hippy/cult commune about 10 miles outside Soda Springs, CA when we were on vacation. They had multiple signs on their road saying to turn back. Of course we didn't. By the time we got to the compound it was really fucking weird, strange symbols (stuff that looked like the life rune, not peace symbol) all over this fence they had surrounding their shitty made cabins and trailers. There was a small group outside of men, women and children staring at us like they were expecting us (cameras on the path Im sure)

I read it a few days ago. Maybe ten pages back.

Said he had a gun but was so scared he couldn't have drawn it anyway.

It happens. The uninitiated have no idea.

This story makes me very sad. I won't go into it, but that is a very sad story.

Manson gang leftovers.

I was driving down Interstate 20 near Tyler,Texas around one o'clock in the morning. I saw what I can only describe as a black panther run in front of my car and then back into the woods in the blink of an eye. I have been told that there isn't any in Texas tho.

Back in 1993 I went camping/fishing with a high school friend just outside of Lincoln Nebraska. After a full day of fishing, we went to sleep in our tent.

In the early morning hours my friend awakens me absolutely terrified. Oddly enough I could see him perfectly clear due to the fact that our tent was illuminated from above. Then I realized that it sounded like horses running around the tent. The sound of hoofs that is. It took a moment for me to process what was happening. I went to open the tent to see what the hell was going on and the moment I touched the zipper...everything went dark and quiet. We both got out and searched the immediate area and found nothing. We threw the tent in the back of the truck and got the hell out of there.

Sure would like to know what was hovering over our tent that night!

A calf skeleton hanging upside down from a tree and the fresh remains of another calf on an "alter."

I never saw it but security guards in Texas told me they often saw, late at night outside Mesquite, in the river bottom there, an old stagecoach pull up and stop, then vanish. You may have been in some kind of time anomaly. I once had something similar associated with the Little Bighorn

We were on one of our many camping outings at an isolated small selection of hard woods that wasn't more than a couple of acres in size that was situated on the north side of a desolate dirt road, the woods though was surrounded by miles of corn fields. To the south across,the road there is a massive swamp. There were a bunch of us at the camping spot that night. We were drinking and such as we were prone to do in those days and hanging out by a camp fire. Our camp was set about a 100 yards into the woods on the north side or you could say it was a good stretch to the road from where we were camped at. There was an old logging/tractor trail that ran from north east to south west and came out by a drive that intersected with the road and also with a tractor trail that swung around the woods back to the north West Point. This is how we would get back to our camp for the old trail threw the woods was over grown and big old dead trees had fallen over making driving threw there impossible. The nearest house was a couple miles away in any direction. There where a few of us out that night. 5 or 6 at least maybe a few more. One of the guys was having girl friend issues and wanted to go home so one fellow of our group offered him a ride home. We listened to them get into the car start up an drive round the woods an soon you could tell they had hit the road and where on the way back to town. Side note: town was about 25 to 30 min drive there so his trip was going to take at least an hour before he would be back. It wasn't but a few minutes after we couldn't hear the vehicle any more when we started to hear some one walking from the road threw woods and they seemed to be using the old path an definitely heading our way. We were laughing and getting a kick out of it thinking that our buddies thought they could scare us. We figured that one of them must have jumped out and was trying to sneak up on us as our other friend drove round the block. Well he wasn't doing to good of a job at it. It was loud and obviously human. Soon though things got weird, for then it began to sound as if some powerful beast was breaking limbs and trees as it came closer an closer. I recall one real loud crack that sounded like a massive tree had been broke in half. At this point we started yelling our friends name saying things like ya real funny we know it's you and such, but it kept getting closer and it still was not being quiet about it until suddenly as it drew nearer, and I mean like 20-30 yards away, every thing just went silent. Now mind you we are not small guys, nor are we unused to the creatures of the wilds so we stood our ground with our backs to the fire peering out into the darkness. I think there was a part of us that still thought it was our buddy messing with us or some other backwoods fellow. But that's when it became real creepy...There would be a leaf rustle here, a small crack there and it didn't take a genius to figure out It was circling us. It couldn't have been more than 10 feet just out side of fire light and we could barely follow it as it went. I'd almost say it was letting us track it movement around the camp site. Well at that point we figured we had better get out of there and back to the cars and get some lights on for we are so used to trouncing around at night in the woods we didn't even bring a flash light with us to the camp. So, with out thinking about it we basically made a defensive huddle and scurried out to the cars and immediately flipped the lights on. Nothing. Never heard any thing else. Didn't see any thing. So we waited for our other friend to arrive all the while still trying to telling our self that it had to have been our buddies doing a hell of a job messing with us. When our friend made it back and we saw he didn't have any one else with him and he saw us all standing by our vehicles holding what ever make shift weapons we had come up with he ask what the heck we were doing, we told him we are leaving now.

I live in NC and saw Sasquatch in south mountains state park.

Very interesting

A badger so fucking big it could stick its head down into a 30 gallon trash can with all four feet on the ground.

I immediately decided that puppy could have all the trash it wanted.

A friend and I saw a nest on the ground on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in NE Oregon.

It was about 3 1/2 feet outside diameter.
Loosely made of limbs.

Not well made.
If you or I made it possibly 15 minutes to construct.
It had not fallen out of a tree.
It was on the flat on the uphill side of a tree 2 maybe 2 1/2 feet in diameter.
This was in a white Fir dominated forest with a thick compact layer of needle/duff.
No tracks in that stuff.

Possibly diarrhea bear scat nearby.

We could not find any description of this ground nest in a Peterson's Field Guide.

This was off the road but not in a wilderness setting.

Thread: Wierd things you have seen in the woods. (Page 68)

1:02 am

A pack of wild dogs fighting over a blow up doll. No lie.

Panthers are all over north east Texas.

If a bear or a cougar is feeding on a carcass, when they temporarily leave, they frequently cover it with sticks and grass to keep other critters off of it. Might have been that.

Back in 1984, the wife and I went hiking in Red River Gorge, Ky. It was getting late, but we decided to hike a 2 mile trail to a natural bridge. Not the big natural bridge, but the small, rarely visited one at the end of the park.

The trail was very steep and overgrown. Not many had used it. The further down into the valley, the darker it got. We finally reached the natural bridge and noticed that it smelled horrible down there. It was a really musky smell, kind of spooky. Hard to describe, but the smell was thick and made us nervous.

Suddenly, up on the opposite hillside, we heard a sound of something big crashing through the brush. We could see saplings, a half mile up the hill, moving and shaking. Whatever it was, let out a loud roar. It was coming down that Hill fast, it was big and it was pissed off.

We turned and ran back up the trail to the car. I think we covered that 2 miles in 5 minutes, which was tough because it's very steep. The entire time, we could hear whatever was behind us. It was growling and gaining ground.

Once in the car, we got the hell out of there. Never did see what it was. We stopped a forest ranger and told him we thought a bear had chased us, but he said there were no bears in the park. This was in 84, and it was true then. There are bears now.

I've often thought it might have been bigfoot, but the wife insists it was a bear or a big cat.

Last Edited by OldWhiteGuy on 01/19/2017 11:54 PM

This is a great story - lot of stories of little people. Green was traditionally the color fairies wore (think leprechauns - not because they're Irish, but because they're a type of fairy). People in parts of the British Isles would traditionally not wear green because it WAS the fairy color.

Shit like this is why I refuse to camp out.

The woods at night is a "different" place, especially in some areas of the north east. Old mining areas are the worst. Mostly nobody goes out at night - but they can never seem to tell you exactly why that is.

I'll tell you why, because they have had the starch scared out of them so good they don't even remember it. They do however remember not to stray off after dark.

Hey man I live near the Clinch in Grainger County.

I live in a lightly wooded area of suburban Boston - about 30 miles from the city. Once, several years ago, I was looking out the front door and saw a large black cat with a long tail going past the woods near our complex. Maybe 15 feet or so from me. Didn't see the head, just the middle and back with the long tail. Didn't want to go out and see the rest of it. This was a large black cat, I'm assuming about the size of a panther, not some kind of house cat. I've been wary of our wooded areas ever since but haven't seen anything like it again. More recently, in the past couple of years, I've heard howling in the distance (not a cat, of course) around 1-2 in the morning. Sounded like a wolf. One night was even a full moon! I also heard what sounded like a very short fight between whatever was howling and what sounded like a dog. Loud snarling and yelping from the other animal. God, I hate the woods.