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The Creepiest, Scariest Things Found By Hikers




1. It was a miracle

My friends and I found a 22-year-old girl, face down in the mud, both legs broken with compound fractures. she had no cell phone, no water, no food, and nothing to keep her warm. Her friend was dead.

A little backstory – my 2 friends and I were hiking in a pretty popular spot in our area. it’s a 150-ft waterfall that takes about 45 mins of uphill hiking to get to.

We decided to go bouldering around the bottom of the waterfall, there are various little pools and boulders where the water runs off from the waterfall. This bouldering trail is not on the main trail, and not many hikers ever veer off of the main trail.

When we found her, obviously we called 911 and gave her any supplies we had. eventually a helicopter showed up and they flew her to the nearest hospital.

Turns out she was hiking with her friend the NIGHT BEFORE when they both fell off of the waterfall. Her friend must have gone to get help, but unfortunately died less than 100 yds from where we found the girl, so no one knew she was hurt or that she was even there.

It’s a miracle she was still alive and mind blowing to think what she had gone through when we found her 20 hours later.
Article.
Fund to help her medical costs.

2. An assailant and an unconscious victim

Roughly eight years ago, my friend and I were walking towards Avenue Street on St. Clair in Toronto. We decided to take a short hike through the ravine below after passing Bathurst. We walked just adjacent to the Loblaws superstore — here’s a Google Map image of the area.

My friend first heard the thudding; with a really squishy sound. I distinctly remember the grunts followed by a single impactful thud. As we cautiously walked through, we came across a large man throwing his entire body weight into driving his foot into an unconscious man’s face on the ground.

My first instincts were to just run, but for some stupid reason, I got between the victim and the assailant. My friend was screaming for me to get away, but while wrestling the guy, I threw my phone at her and told her to call the police.

The assailant tried to fight me, but he was exhausted from the beating he gave the victim. So he took a weak swing at me, turned around, and ran away as soon as he heard my friend talking on the phone.

As I turned around, I couldn’t believe it. The victim’s face was barely human. It was flat, covered in blood, his shoulder / chest area had a large laceration from the top to just above the nipple. Each breath he took bubbled with blood gushing out of his mouth. You could hear him moaning. It was just awful. I didn’t want to risk doing too much without much knowledge of first aid, so I just took off my shirt and tried to cover up the laceration on his shoulder with some pressure.

Police came. Fire Fighters. Ambulances.

I don’t remember much of what was asked of me by the police, or how long we were asked to stick around. The victim was quickly taken to the hospital. I still don’t know what happened to him. I like to think he survived, but those injuries were gory.

But it really was traumatizing just seeing someone an inch away from death; much like the girl you found with multiple life-threatening injuries. Those things are very difficult to forget.

3. Weird latin phrase

The words “Per audacia ad ignotum” drawn in the snow in the absolute middle of nowhere, yet no footprints around them. The words were probably a few hours old. The closest translation we could find was “through audacity towards the unknown.”

4. This one gets eerie

Took my young children to a cave not far from the house. Popular spot, but we had the place to ourselves. You can walk through it in about 30 minutes without too much difficulty. It has a tiny exit at the opposite end. It was pretty muddy, so we decided to turn around and head back to the entrance. Halfway back, there was a lit candle sitting about eight feet up one side. It was definitely not there on the first trip. I went into full-on protective-dad-mode knowing there was likely someone hiding in the dark while we walked the rest of the way out.

5. A nightmare

I was backpacking in Yellowstone above the tree line at about 10,500 feet. We are hiking on a ridge above a lake when all the sudden we come across a horse skull. No body just the skull, pretty cool looking. We get to our campsite not to far away from the lake near where we found the horse skull. When we get climb down to the lake we find the body of the horse rotting on the edge of the lake with with negative film strips floating in the water and laying around the shore near the body.

6. Regular Floridaman

A man wearing a Ku Klux Klan hat with eye holes. Nothing else. Masturbating. I biked passed him in the woods on the way home in 7th grade. Yes, it was Florida.

7. No one was around for miles

I’ve spent various stretches of time backpacking and camping throughout the US and seen some strange things.

My brother and I came across an abandoned trailer town, of sorts, that scared the hell out of us.

We also came across a rundown town (really, really small) out in northern New Mexico that seemed to have one person living in it. We based that on the fact that there was still some food and supplies there that were fairly fresh (perhaps just a few days old). Spent a couple days there trying to find the person, just to find out why they were staying in the town. Never found a person.

We found the skeletal remains of an unknown number of deer (ranging from bucks to fawn) ensnared in a barbed-wire fence that encompassed a 10×10 area in the Ozarks. A few of the skulls topped the fence posts, and there was one post in the middle of this area that had decaying deer bodies (looked to be two, but there were only 6 hooves jutting out of the wreckage) wrapped around it.

We found a dummy hanging from a tree while in the Yukon territory of Canada. Literally out in the middle of the woods. No reason for it, as far as we know.

And we also came across a dead junkie on a road out of Olympia. Obvious OD, as he had his arm tied and a needle in hand. Eyes were glazed over and staring straight ahead, mouth slightly ajar.

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8. A goddamn meth lab

Me and a buddy chose some national forest in Oregon specifically for how remote it was. About a year prior a family became lost and the father was never found, although mother and child lived to tell the tale. Anyway, we set up camp around 4pm after getting pretty deep into the woods on a mountain accessed by logging roads, maybe about 100-200 yards from where we parked, near a lake.

Without much else to do we started a fire and cracked some beers as the sun went down. Then pickup trucks started going through the woods, slowing down when they saw our campfire. We got curious (and stupid via the beers) and went deeper into the woods- seemed like a helluva party was going on. Then we stumbled into a clearing where maybe 15-20 dudes were hanging around a bonfire next to a mossy run down camper trailer. One had a pistol on his hip, another was just chillin with a shotgun. We’re like “oh shit” at first but someone approaches us and acts neighborly and invites us to have a beer, so it seemed okay. They were joking around mostly, some talking about drugs (coke, meth), but there were some older dudes that seemed pretty tense.

As this happened, 4-5 dudes who seemed to be standing sentry at the camper (which didn’t look like it had been moved in a long time) went inside for a few minutes. When they came back out, they said we were faggots and saw us making out. Pretty quickly I got up to head back to our site, but my slower, drunker buddy took a few punches. Then he made it out and started following, and we were sprinting through the forest in the darkness, just hoping to get back to our site by spotting the glowing embers of our burnt out fire, the whole time with gun toters in tow.

We found our site, and with pretty much everything in the tent we pulled the stakes to toss it in the trunk of our car, when we hear an enraged scream only about 50 yards from us “KILL THE FAGGOTS!” So we were like fuck it, dropped the tent and gear without even saying a word to each other, and sprinted in the direction of the car.

We peeled out and thought we were good, but about 30 seconds later some headlights come up from behind us, and I’m like “fuck, that’s the truck that shotgun dude was chillin at!” So now we’re being pursued by crazy gun toting rednecks with a superior vehicle in unfamiliar forest on unmaintained logging roads in the dark, and the only thing we can do is speed up. I remember looking at the speedometer as we approached a washed out hairpin turn and it was moving from 45 to 50 mph, and the truck was tailing us pretty close, like by only a couple feet, and I was pretty sure that we were gonna slide off the cliff and die.

Somehow my drunkass buddy managed to power slide that turn and get some distance between us and the tweakers and we eventually made it to a paved two lane, at which point the truck pulled off.

We put it together later that the camper was a meth lab – nothing else it really could’ve been, deep in the forest with armed guards and shit. But yeah, resulted in a drunken high speed night chase on unfamiliar logging roads and we nearly slid off the side of a mountain.

9. Something feels off

When out exploring an old abandoned quarry with some friends we found this dude stood staring at this rock, occasionally twitching, but he never turned around. We were pretty creeped out so didn’t investigate, and left pretty soon after. Later on that night we found out that another friend was driving down the lane that runs parallel to the quarry found a guy in a black coat stood in the middle of the road, and wouldn’t move. She was pretty freaked out and had to reverse all the way back up the lane in the dark because he was still there. Pretty sure it was the same guy, otherwise it was just a big coincidence.
Proof.

10. A circle

I was backpacking in New Hampshire and camped out for the night after a day hike. I wandered off from our fire to go take a piss and stumbled upon a circle etched into the ground with tuning forks surrounding the circle standing up straight…It looked like a creepy ritual circle and it bugged me out so I booked it back to the group.

11. Could’ve been a Wendigo

I was once canoeing the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. These aren’t your normal backyard ponds. The boundary waters are thousands of enormous lakes interconnected with each other (think mini-great lakes). We had been canoeing and camping along the lakes for about a week at this point. We didn’t really have an itinerary, just planned to boat and camp, fish, and live off the land two weeks. We had a GPS and a sat phone to call a helicopter for pickup whenever we were done.

Anyway, about a week in and we were set to canoe a few hours to the next lake. An hour or so in and we are in the center of a extremely long and narrow lake. Unfortunately, a storm started to blow in and the waves on the lake swelled to 2+ feet. Too much for our dinky canoes. We pull off to a random clearing on the shore and set up camp in rush to avoid being totally thrashed by a rainstorm. We just setup camp and hunker down for the night.

By the next morning it had cleared up. We started walking up the coast of the lake about 200 feet from our camp looking for a good fishing spot. What we actually found was another campsite. However, it was ABSOLUTELY wrecked. Trash strewn everywhere, tent collapsed and torn, clothes on the ground. At first we were just like disgusted like what assholes did this? or left their shit out to be bear food?

The more we looked around though, the weirder things seemed though. For one, their garbage was still hoisted into a tree to keep it safe from bears, but the whole bag was ripped open despite being 30 feet in the air. Second, literally everything except the canoes were still at the campsite. Clothes, packs, food, rope, pans, like a serious set of hiking equipment. Enough for 2 or 3 people. Half of it was trashed and torn open, mostly the packs, tent, and clothes. The other half was totally untouched but thrown on the ground. Like somebody NOPE’d the hell out of there in nothing but their long johns ditching hundreds of dollars of gear in the process. We waited a couple hours and eventually called it back to our helicopter crew– but they hadn’t been aware of anybody else or gotten any distress calls. We eventually just left everything and moved camp. Everybody was pretty upset by it and a day or two later we ended the whole trip early because it seemed like nobody wanted to be out anymore.

It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. First thought was bear attack, but there was food left uneaten, and I’ve seen bear attacks on camps before, but nothing like this. Bears rip open packs and go after food, and are generally pretty easy to scare away. What still sticks with me is why all their clothes and packs were still there with half being totally destroyed and half being untouched. I still don’t get it.

I’ve done a lot of other camping and hiking, rafting and biking, all around the country and I’ve never had any other weird experiences like that.

12. That fog does crazy things to you

I was hiking in the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington back in ’03. I was trying to do this really snazzy hike from the Ocean to Mt. Olympus.

Well, day 1 is a blast, get everything accomplished.

Day 2, fog. Fog as thick as anything you can imagine. I can’t get a decent GPS fix, so I’m pretty much blind, but I know if I follow the Hoh river upstream, I’ll get to one of the campsites I’m going for. Day goes by, and fog isn’t clearing up at all. I get to a fairly big clearing and set up my tent. I grab a power bar and chill out as it starts going to the darkest black night I’ve ever experienced. I’m seriously a bit unnerved at the whole thing…not scared as much as just…anxious.

About 2 in the morning, I start hearing this huffing noise. Like Darth Vader without the helmet on. My imagination starts to go freaky, and I reach for my flashlight. I pull the drawstring on the tent a little…very quietly…and poke my head out. Still dark as death. I hear the noise coming from maybe, MAYBE five feet to my right.

At this point, I’m seriously re-thinking my belief in sasquatch.

I poke my flashlight out and turn it on. I’m a few feet away from a MASSIVE Roosevelt Elk, who’d lost his way in the dark as well. He sees the flashlight, bolts the other way, tags a tree and knocks himself clean out.
I laid in the tent until I heard a groan, a bunch of commotion and the big guy grunt away.

13. Ah, that’s really creepy

Bushwalking in NSW (Australia) me and my friend came across this weird platform looking thing made out of rocks. Later that year the cops arrested some bloke on suspicion of the murders of a series of backpackers who had gone missing over the course of a few years, and at the sites of several of the murders slightly off in the bush were these ‘altars’. Current affairs show runs footage of one (the trial and run up to it were all over the news) and yeah it’s that thing we found. The ‘altars’ were typically no more than 300 yards from the victim’s shallow graves. The guy who was arrested and subsequently convicted for the murders is Ivan Milat, Australia’s worst serial killer.

Nb the cops are pretty sure that at least one other person was involved in the murders than the one now in jail for the crime, they just couldn’t prove it.

14. That image scared me at first viewing

I was out fossil hunting in a wash after a thunderstorm the night before. I figured it had to uncover a bit of stuff down in the streambed. I found this.
Second image.

15. Three stories!

  1. Went on a 5 day gold panning trip with a couple buddies of mine. We drove 6 hours down unused logging roads, we’re talking totally overgrown roads with trees having to be removed from the road to pass. We saw not one human the entire time we were out there, except for on the 3rd night… at 3am. We are sitting around the fire, drinking some beers, swatting at bugs, and shooting the shit when I hear a something. I look over and notice some light in the trees. What the… It’s a truck, driving up the logging road we had cleared ourselves to get there, at 3am. The truck gets up to where we are, pulls into where we made camp (a small turn off spot for logging trucks), sits there for 10sec while we all kinda stare in shock at one another, I get up and start walking towards the truck to say hello and ask what the heck they are doing out at 3am on abandoned logging roads when the truck just backs up, turns around, and drives off the way it came… The guy(s) just drove 6 hours down logging roads all through the night, sees us and leaves without saying a word… We are all sitting there going, “uhhh what the fuck?” We all figured this guy was driving down the road, getting out and coming back to kill us in our sleep. Next morning we head down the road and nothing, they didn’t set up camp or anything… Just left. We figured we were likely camped out near a grow-op for one of the gangs (Hells Angels most likely) and they were coming out to check who had come out to their spot, or they were there to pick the crop in the middle of the night.
  2. One time driving down a bunch of logging roads at night (4am?), looking for a campsite we had driven past, we took a wrong turn and drove right into a drug operation cashing out the crop. We turn a corner and BLAM flood lights and like 15 guys all staring at us in the middle of the forest down logging roads. We just sorta turned around and got the fuck outta there. (Hu… this is a lot like the first story except I’m the creep in the truck! Ha!)
  3. One time I was out hiking in the back woods with a buddy of mine. Waaaaaaay out there with nobody in sight. In the evening I start to gather some wood for a campfire that evening and I pull this stick, out of the trees. Stick is maybe 5ft long 3″ wide? It looks like a nice walking stick, straight and mostly smooth… Then I notice that one end of the stick is REALLY smooth, like it’s been whittled by someone. I’m thinking, oh wow what are the odds of that! It IS a walking stick, someone has carved a smooth handle on one end! NOPE It’s not a handle. It’s a dick. Someone had carved the end of this stick into a dick. Someone was fucking the forest. Literally. This wasn’t some crude carving just FYI. This was a work. Like the person put HOURS into carving it, and was very good at carving. This was a 6″ dong carved with love and feeling, right down to it having “bulging” veins and other fine details…. WHAT THE FUCK. So I took the dickstick back to camp and threatened to poke my buddy with it. Yelling that the forest was going to give him tree AIDS.

16. The content and situation will surprise you

I found a old super 8 camera up on Springer mountain in Georgia. My mom had an old projector so we played the film and it turned out to be a couple having sex in an anthill.

17. Don’t follow the music

I lived in a national park by myself for three months. Several times when I was going back to my trailer for the day, I would hear music like a music box or an ice cream truck. It was always loud and sounded like it was coming from somewhere over my head. One day I decided to look for the source so I followed the dirt road past my trailer. The music continued, I couldn’t tell if I was getting closer or not. I had my eyes on the trees and looked down just in time to avoid stepping on a snake. I scrambled back but it didn’t move. I realized it was dead and it wasn’t alone, there were half a dozen dead copperheads stretched out in the road, looking in the same direction.

I went back to get my car because I couldn’t bring myself to step over them, but by the time I got my keys, the music had stopped and I didn’t hear it again.

Sometime after this happened, my friends told me there was a haunted prison in the same park, the Pea Farm. So, that was good to know.

18. That’s really weird

Over the years when I have told this story, many people haven’t believed me, but it’s true as the sky is blue. Me and my brother were hiking out in our new backwoods (we had just moved in to a new house) and we stumbled upon a small open grass field. In the center of it, there was a person with a blue jacket crouched over. We thought it was a friend of ours that we had recently met, so I ran out to meet. I did not have my glasses on, but I got pretty close enough to see that it was a grown man leaned over the carcass of a deer, stabbing it with an unsharpened stick. He looked up, and saw me. I was pretty freaked out, so I turned around and yelled at my brother to run, and so we started to sprint as fast as we could back home.

19. Watch out for these kinds of farmers

When I was 19, I spent a lot of time wandering the west coast. I was a pretty naive girl. I decided to backpack the Lost Coast (close to Eureka, CA) and as I was driving the long single lane dirt road to get to the starting point, I noticed a completely out of place Escalade tailgating me hard. I finally pulled over and let them pass. Not long after, I get to what looks like a tiny little grocery store. The only other car is the Escalade. I head inside and see four huge guys talking to the shop owner behind the counter. These guys were enormous, all four were easily around 6’4-6’6 and three of them looked like pure iron. The leader had the longest dreads I had ever seen. These guys were tough and their persona resonated all the way to the door where I was standing. They immediately stopped talking and looked at me. They were not smiling, and the dreadlock fellow had scars all over his face. I turned around and walked out, headed down to the coast and did my backpacking thing. When I finished, I hitched a few rides back to my car. The different locals who picked me told me stories about the massive amounts of marijuana being grown in the area and the patrols used to secure the crops. They thoroughly warned me not to camp in the area and to NEVER leave the road. “People die out here” they said. So, yeah. California pot mafia.

20. It was a weird, weird sight

A cage. Not like a trapping cage or anything but something that could easily hold 5-10 average sized people.
I was hiking in the mountains just above the house i lived in, at the time, in Missoula, Mt. Took maybe 45 minutes of walking, mostly uphill and without a path, to get to the spot. Round steel bars for the edges and rope instead of chain link for the walls and ceiling. It was all set up just on the far side of the ridgeline i was walking, so it couldn’t be seen I suppose.

Nothing around it, no foot prints or tire tracks or anything. The rope looked undamaged as well. No idea what it was for but it definitely creeped me the fuck out.

21. It was creepy, but the ending tops it off

My dad and I were out camping in the Mountains. We had set up our tents and then we heard screams in the woods. We as black folks don’t stick around to find out whats going on. So we packed up our stuff and drove to a different part. We thought it was mountains folks eating people or something. We drive down by the store and told the clerk that we heard screams. Turns out it was an orgy for people who dress up in animal costumes. He was telling us that they have been doing this for years.

22. So much fear

Once a friend and I were driving on an old dirt road WAY out in the stix in south Alabama, past an old (19th century) cemetery, when out of nowhere a truck starts tailgating us. This was really late at night and even in the daytime it would have been rare to see a vehicle, so we were a little creeped out. I speed up and the truck stays right on my bumper. I’m now driving as fast as I can without flying off the road on this small, windy dirt road (think Dukes of Hazard only in a Volvo station wagon) and still can’t shake the truck. My buddy who was with me knew the area well and said that we were about to hit a paved road “T-bone” intersection, and that there was also another small dirt road coming off at a sharp angle from that intersection. He said that if I could get ahead just enough to get out of immediate sight of the truck, then I could cut the wheel hard to the left and whip in to the spur road and hopefully ditch the truck.

I did what he said but right when I start the turn at the T-bone I see what looks like an incredibly tall person just inside the tree line across the paved road, covered head to toe in long hair. As I’m turning I shout “Holy shit! Do you see…” and before I can finish my friend says “…that big tall hairy guy!!!” I finish the turn, we ditch the truck, and got the hell out of there, but to this day we really don’t know what we saw.

23. “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told.”

Hiking alone at dusk doing a five mile loop in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles. I see another lone hiker approaching from the opposite direction. As he gets closer, I suddenly realize I know this person: It’s the guy who played Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. We get within three feet of each other. He looks at me. He sees the lightning bolt of recognition hit my face. His sad and resigned expression back said it all: “Yes, I’m him. No, I’m not really a serial killer.”

I walked briskly by him anyway and didn’t look back until I was a good 100 yards down the trail.

24. Good thing they didn’t open it

My buddies and I found a cooler in a gully while camping.

It was dark and we left it, but authorities found it a few weeks later and there was a body in it. So that’s cool.

25. This is the creepiest one of all

Too many weirds and creepies to list, so let’s just go with the most recent. Behold, the mysterious alpine cucumber, found only in the Pacific Northwest in early spring somewhere above 3,500′ (1,000+ meters).
(Source: bizarreismm)

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