re: What is the creepiest thing you’ve experienced while in the woods?

Circa 2004 I used to hang out near the Tchefuncte River around Madisonville after school and during the summers. Saw some weird stuff at remnants of camp outs - massive catfish heads hanging from trees, skinned cats (I think) hanging from trees, needles, condoms, "satanic" drawings of pentagrams and whatever. I figured it was a group of goth kids trying to be edgy, still it was odd to be 13-14 years old, strolling around and all of a sudden you walk into a skinned dead cat hanging from a tree with a pentagram under it.

I'm not much of an outdoors type, so that's the best I got. Other humans doing weird stuff, scarier to me than random large animals.

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Probably not true but these stories will make your hair stand up. Its all about weird stuff that supposedly happened in the woods when searching for people. It fits in with some of the stores others have posted.

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That one where the thing mentions his neck scar... if that’s real, then damn...

Grandpa and I found a floater in False River in the late 60's.

There he was just floating and bumping up against some old pilings. We found a game warden and he said that the guy was a old fisherman that got blasted drunk every day and probably fell in.

Too bad we didn't have camera phones back then.

I remember being at summer Christian camp growing up. There was a story the counselors told every year about an escaped patient from the psych ward down the road. We were all a little scared but skeptical. After the lights had been turned out for awhile for us to go to sleep, someone from the outside came up to a window and put his arms up in a scary way (for a 10 year old), and one of the kids screamed like a little girl and kicked out the window . It was pitch black and then the cabin door opened up. At this point, we all freaked out and started screaming. Then the counselor turned on the lights and said what the frick is wrong with yall? He didn't buy our story, but I think he was in on it and he didn't want to get in trouble for us smashing a window. I was legit scared for that week to go to sleep, and that boy slept in someone else's bed praying the whole night

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a buddy of his was in a deer stand, heard something walking in the woods, and then an older woman walked out into the clearing. Come to find out, it was a woman who escaped a prison near by.

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Did he get her?

I’m pretty sure most of, if not all of the stories on /nosleep are fictional

Elk hunting. Suprise blizzard came through.

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Of all the things that could harm you in the woods, coyotes are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy down the list. It's silly to be afraid of coyotes past puberty.

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Who said I was scared of them?

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Who said I was scared of them?

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Didn't you say that walking down a dirt road at night with a flashlight and two firearms was "incredibly nerve racking" and cited hogs and coyotes as the reason?

ETA: the first few times you walk through the woods alone at night is certainly nerving, but you quickly learn that coyotes are not serious threats. If you even get close enough to see them, they scatter quickly.

I was creek hunting for arrowheads and scouting for deer trails (a real treasure in the expansive big woods like I was in) on a late fall evening. A close family member had died days before, and my heart was heavy, and I knew sleep wouldn't come easily (it never really does anyway for an insomniac) once the memories of them started to flow back in, and so I decided to pull a late nighter like I used to do when I was young and extra full of life and adventure: I'd night hunt the gravel bars for points churned up to the surface from the rains.

By the time I'd decided to not turn back and keep hunting- and thereby guarantee a dark walk out- I was about 3 miles in from where my truck was parked. I was completely at home and at ease in the deep, dark and seemingly endless big woods that I was in...key word for you the reader to know is, "was": I still am all of the above, but nowadays I don't surface hunt the creek I was in for artifacts in that particular 1/4 mile stretch of creek after dark; for what I experienced this night was a conundrum of high emotions and a heavy heart that coincided with events that I cannot and will not attempt to ever honestly explain. There's always an explanation, but I don't know what mine is.

The stretch of creek I was arrowhead and artifact hunting in is mostly downstream from, but also runs partially parallel with the beginning point of a ridge where a system of stepped terraces were the home to primitive man going back thousands of years. The area- especially the ungodly steep terraces and hills- have, luckily, gone almost untouched, relatively speaking, and much of the timber in these woods and especially on the terraces is the growth from the regeneration after the second clear cut well over a hundred years ago. In short, the land is grand. It is wild.

Since the conditions were so good for hunting for points after the big rain, I cut the headlamp on and continued to search well after dark. I've done this many times before, and when the conditions are right, like they were that night, I've found some DANDY Paleo, Archaic, tons of Woodland and lots of Mississippian period points and artifacts. In the same conditions one night and on the same exact stretch of creek I found the oldest point that the archeologist whom I showed it to said I could find in the area: A Grade Ten, 2" long, fluted Clovis style spear point that was expertly knapped down to the thickness of a 10 cent dime that was over twelve thousand years old. Again, that came from an archeologist who is likely the preeminent expert regarding archeology in the immediate area I was hunting in. The craftsman who made that functional piece of art was likely proud of it.

Suffice to say, those hills and hollows go way back with man, and the creek I was hunting was so ancient and so prime territory that the Paleo period man who flint knapped that ultra fine, ultra deadly spearhead point over 1200 decades ago, all the way down through the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian eras were there for the same reasons, that is, survival: They set up shop on the high terraces above the river where the mosquitoes were few, the breeze was steady, where the floods couldn't reach them, and where fin, feather, fur and stone for their tools was plentiful. I'd imagine that if I crossed paths with any of them during their stay on those terraces above that river that they wouldn't be happy with my presence, and being alone upon my arrival would almost certainly guarantee that my name would go down in the annals of history as that of "a dead man walking."

I don't know who or what I crossed paths with that night when the 1st cold front of the season was coming in, but up until that point, as always, I felt exhilarated: Thankful to be unlike my dead relative (and friend) to be alive, breathing in the crisp and cool air and feeling the dark, cold wilderness literally blanket and cloak itself around me. The wind was whipping with the front, but as it became late, all but the highest parts of the canopy above me in the deep, dark, miles long, mile wide, wild river hollow that I was in became quite calm, quite serene, and quite lonely- just the way I like it.

Used to like it. I still like it, but not there.

The creek I was hunting in is a solid 10 miles in every direction from the nearest road, let alone the nearest house, but the exception to the nearest civilization was to my rear and from the direction in which I came from, Southeast. The only way to get in and out quickly, relatively speaking, is that creek, but if you deviate over +/-10 degrees from the azimuthal direction that the creek flows you will deviate your way in to the longest walk out of there, period, and cell phone service is DOA. These woods are not for the extroverts.

The bad part starts when the hour became unreasonably late and the decision came to turn back when I was about 4 miles in. Something happened and I felt a feeling I'd never felt before: For the 1st time I didn't like where I was at, and I wanted out quick, and so did something else, and my headlamp battery was getting low so I decided to save it for the stretches where I knew I'd need it and hike out by the growing moonlight. By that point the woods were as quiet as they'd been since I closed the truck door earlier that afternoon, but the sound of the last whispers of the north wind still rustled the leaves above, and so there was still some discrepancy on what I heard on the terraces high above me shortly after that light went out and my pace picked up: A low, albeit loud, rattling sound- like stones in a container being shaken in a certain cadence, along with a low, non-metallic banging type noise and cadence in the darkness of the terraces above me.

I won't delve too deeply into the details of what happened on my hellish, miles long skirmish out, because I don't know exactly what happened, but I will say that I know squirrels don't cut acorns at night, and even so, those weren't acorns nor were they falling vertically: Whatever it was that was hitting in the leaf litter and water around me and that I could see in the glint of moonlight coming through the canopy was coming at an angle- and fast, too.

What I will say is that whatever it was that I heard on my way out over the rippling sound of leaves on the cold north wind, it drove my mind wild with helpless fear like that of a little boy being told a ghost story, and what I heard can only be described as yelps and whoops and low frequency banging and rattling in a set cadence, along with objects singing through the air from something above me on those pitch black terraces.

But the whoops and the hoots were what I will remember until I am dust: Whatever it was doing it, it was directed at me, and it was not friendly sounding. I was the only person in those private woods (that eventually turned into the National Forest, hence the remoteness), I had to be: My direction was the only way in and it was from private land behind a locked gate, and without it there's no way in to those terraces except for an aimless, miles long hike through wilderness.

I hope nobody was in those woods with me, because the scariest thing I've ever experienced in the woods was what I couldn't see. The scariest thing that ever happened to me in the woods was the noise: Very, very chilling noises, and I've heard all the noises the Southeast woods have to offer.

They were almost inhuman noises.

Almost.