Being outdoors and connecting with nature can be a beautiful experience. Breathing in the crisp air, looking at the flowers bloom, and basking in the silence can be a healing experience. Hold up, maybe it’s a little too quiet! These hikers share how their experiences outdoors took a creepy turn for the worse. Content has been edited for clarity.
“I Thought I Had Seen The Supernatural”
“I went hiking in North Central Pennsylvania forest country with my girlfriend. We went for an entire weekend, and the hike was nearly thirty miles long.
It was an absolutely pitch-black, moonless night. I couldn’t fall asleep, and my girlfriend was sleeping lightly next to me. All I could do was lie in the tent and listen to the sounds in the empty forest. Suddenly, I saw a light moving in the distance through our tent. The light was small and dim, and it almost looked like someone carrying a flashlight.
I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I thought it could be a park ranger, because I saw those guys walking around from time to time. I also thought it could be a night hiker, because I hike at night sometimes too. I had no idea what it was, by I was absolutely certain it was heading towards our tent.
The light followed a wave-shaped path through the trees and meandered slowly in our direction. I called out to it and woke up my girlfriend.
I shouted, ‘Hey! We know you are there! What do you want?’
It didn’t reply and moved silently. There was no question whatever it was knew we were there, and absolutely was coming over to inspect us. I began to freak out.
My girlfriend yelled, ‘Go away!’
I was too scared to unzip the tent and confront it. I’m not kidding. I was terrified.
The light approached the tent, did a circle around us, and left the way it came. It floated up and down, and snaked its way back into the forest without a sound.
We were completely shaken by the experience and had zero answers. After the hike, we asked the rangers at the station if anyone had reported seeing floating lights, but they just looked at us like we were crazy.
For two years, I sat with the experience in my brain. Until it happened again.
I was with the same girlfriend, in the same tent, at the same time of night. Through the thin fabric of our tent, we watched a small light float up and down toward us. Then it made contact and landed on the tent!
It was a firefly. It had always been a firefly. My tent had reflectors on the zippers and lines, which attracted bugs at night. For two years, I thought I had seen the supernatural.”
Spirits and Snow Trails
“About five years ago, a friend and I were hiking in the Oregon Cascades in the mid-spring. We were about six miles away from the road, and the hiking trail was completely covered with snow. We planned to hike for about five days to attempt a few summit peaks, so by the end of the trip, we looked grizzly.
As we were hiking, two guys and a dog appear from behind a tree. The older man appeared to be in his mid-fifties, and his son looked to be in his mid-twenties. They were wearing trail running shorts, running shoes, and a water backpack. They had no clothes, food, or supplies which would be of actual use on their hike.
They asked, ‘Is the Pacific Crest Trail open?’
My friend and I looked at each other, looked at them, and tried extremely hard not to laugh.
I explained, ‘We are five miles from the Pacific Crest Trail and two thousand feet lower in elevation. Why do you want to go on the trail?’
The older man said, ‘We are planning on doing a twenty-mile run along the trail. We wanted to start on the other side of the mountains but got sidetracked due to the snow.’
We tried to explain to him getting to the trail wouldn’t be possible given the snow conditions, but the older man refused to listen.
I told the man, ‘You guys are both messed up. It is dangerous out here. Let me hike you out.’
He responded, ‘Nah, we’ve got this!’
Afterward, the father and son ran away in the wrong direction.
We decided to camp for the night, and we followed their foot trails for a half-mile the next morning. The father, son, and dog completely disappeared. We couldn’t find a single sign of them even being there the previous day.
A few days later, we drove to the parking area of the trail the father and son supposedly went to. I looked through the wilderness permit tags to try to find a name, and I found nothing.
Here’s where things get really strange. A few years later, my parents ran into the same nondescript people. They asked about the same trail loop, and it happened in the same snowy conditions.
My dad also tried to hike them out, but they denied and took off in the wrong direction. He followed their tracks for a half mile before he lost them.
So if anyone sees the ghosts of the Oregon Cascades, let me know.”
The Bizzare Boy Scout
“When I was a teenager, my scout group went on a camping trip to the scout reserve. My dad was our scoutmaster, and all the scouts were pretty good friends with each other. There was a kid named Andrew, and he was the youngest of us all. He was withdrawn and strange, and none of us knew him very well. However, we were all still nice to him because he was, overall, still a sweet kid.
Towards the end of the week, the scouts went on an overnight hike and boat ride without my dad. We took the boat across the lake, and afterward, we hiked in the woods for hours. It was an extremely hot day, and my brother was leading us on the hike without drinking much water. He was also wearing a light jacket, which caused him to become extra warm.
Eventually, my brother found a sweet spot next to a huge cliff where we could jump into the lake below. We made a fire, cooked dinner, and fell asleep under the stars.
Around four-thirty in the morning, my friend woke me up and asked, ‘Hey! Do you know where Andrew is? I can’t find him anywhere.’
I anxiously replied, ‘No, I haven’t seen him. Maybe he went to the bathroom.’
We waited about five minutes, but Andrew never came back. My friend and I started searching the surrounding area and calling his name. Nothing. We hike a little further, and I spotted his sleeping bag at the edge of the cliff. I was full-on panicking at this point. I looked over the side of the cliff to see if he was there, but I didn’t see anything. We tried to wake my brother up to help us, but he was sick from a heatstroke. I had to take charge and find our missing friend.
My friend and I went into the woods and started screaming, ‘Andrew! Where are you?’
I thought I heard something. I stopped yelling and listened, and I heard a faint cry deeper in the woods. I started running, crashing through the thick undergrowth, and getting lashed in the face with branches. His cries became louder, and eventually, I arrived at a huge clearing in the woods to find Andrew sitting on a fallen tree in just a shirt and underwear. He said he had been there for hours already!
He told me, ‘I woke up on the ground in the dark and had no idea where I was at. I decided just to sit it out, and try to find my way back to camp at dawn.’
It was really spooky. How did he even get there? The craziest thing was his watch somehow was reset, so he didn’t actually know what time it was.
We all accepted the theory that Andrew was sleepwalking. I still think it’s strange because he was so deep in the woods without a single scratch on him. To this day, I wonder what actually happened.”
Menacing Mountain Trail
“This story happened a few years back. I hiked in fifteen miles into the alpine wilderness, and at nightfall, I started to set up camp. As I was setting up, a young guy in shorts with no backpack popped up out of nowhere.
He asked, ‘Do you have any water?’
The guy looked disheveled, so I replied, ‘Of course, take as much as you need.’
He took a long drink, paused, and said, ‘I have been hiking since yesterday morning. My friend and I went way back off-trail and hiked some cliffs along the way. His brains are everywhere.’
I laughed. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not, and he was sending off a really strange vibe. He didn’t seem like he was dangerous, he just seemed to be in shock.
I asked, ‘Can you clarify what you just said? The last part?’
I offered him some food and drinks in exchange for his honest story.
Long story short, his friend slipped, fell, and hit his head. When he fell, his head smacked a rock and his body became wedged into a crevasse on the cliff. The guy spent all day hiking looking for somebody to help rescue his friend. He was absolutely shredded, skinned, and torn up.
He begged me to come with him to help get his friend out of the cliff.
I grabbed him and gently said, ‘Hey, I have a phone. We can try to call emergency services.’
Surprisingly, I had enough phone service to reach emergency services.
The guy and I hiked fifteen miles while leading emergency services to the location of his friend. When we finally arrived, I was impressed with how professional their response was. Volunteers swarmed in to help too. Both emergency services and the volunteers couldn’t leave the location for nearly six days due to white-out snow conditions. I stayed too and set up a comfy campsite for the medics and volunteers to rest on their way back down.
This was definitely the most sad, bizarre, and life-altering experience that has ever happened to me.”
“They Hiked Over Fifteen Miles Barefoot”
“A few years ago, my wife and her friends were out just east of Portland, Oregon. It was an extremely hot weekend, and they were on their way to Hood River. They all decided to stop at a popular natural area in Oregon called ‘The Devil’s Punchbowl’ to cool off.
They planned on being quick, so they only brought their bathing suits and flip-flops with them. The girls figured it wouldn’t take too long to hike up the mile trail, jump in the water, walk back, and continue driving. When they finally arrived at the natural area, they were greeted by a sizeable crowd of seventy-five to one hundred people. They hurriedly jumped into the water, got out, and noticed a small trail of smoke billowing into the sky.
Within minutes, the smoke trail grew to be huge, and the smell started to waft into the natural area. A few folks attempted to exit the natural area, only to discover a wall of fire had blocked the trail. Everyone called emergency services, and within a few minutes, a helicopter flew overhead. The fire was now rapidly spreading and was visible in the natural area.
A volunteer somehow entered the natural area with a map and GPS. They mapped out a potential escape route which was viable as long as the winds sustained their current direction. My wife, her friends, and the group of others in the natural area proceeded to hike for thirty-six hours of terror. They hiked over fifteen miles on rugged terrain, barefoot, and in bathing suits! Nobody knew what direction they were hiking for nearly twelve hours. This fire later came to be known as the ‘Eagle Creek Fire’, and it almost torched an entire side of the Columbia River Valley.
Luckily, everyone escaped the wildfire alive. It was pretty incredible teamwork.”
“I Could Sense Somebody Watching Me”
“A couple of years ago, I went hiking in Japan. I went up to a trio of mountains and saw the three correlating shrines, each a bit more remote and more treacherous than the last. I went up one of the mountains and came down on what I would now consider being the wrong side.
While walking down the mountain, I came down to an old service road. There were clear signs of recent landslides by the road, but I wasn’t too worried about it this particular day because it had been dry for weeks.
I arrived roughly at the base of the mountain and can only describe what I walked through as a ‘shanty town’. There were several houses built like boxes made of sheet metal, and they were all spread apart. The service road was dotted with these houses for about one hundred meters or so. No one was outside, but I felt like I could sense somebody watching me. I did actually spot a couple of pairs of eyes peering out at me once or twice.
It definitely felt like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Plus, it was getting dark outside. I raced back to the bus stop, only to find out the next bus wouldn’t be arriving for multiple hours.
I ended up running out of there, but it was a very weird, eerie experience. I could only guess I had stumbled upon some kind of homeless population which had holed up in what appeared to be an old campground.
I later did some cursory digging to see what I could find out about the area, but it didn’t really produce anything. The ‘right’ side of the mountain was a cozy little riverside village. You’d never guess its polar opposite was just on the other side of a mountain. It was all very bizarre, and it feels like a fever dream kind of memory.”
Weird Happenings in Wyoming
“A while back, my co-worker and I were in Wyoming hiking and conducting surveys. We were in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t a road or any property in sight. As I was looking around, I spotted a couple of big rocks had which had been laid against another rock jutting out of a hill. This made a small cave or shelter big enough for a person to lie down in. I walked around the other side of the shelter to see if there was anything inside. There was a large tarp covering the opening, but I could see a few items laying inside.
After taking some pictures prior to disturbing anything, I removed the tarp and found a backpack, pink hiking boots, and a black duffle bag. The backpack had nothing inside and neither did the hiking boots. The black duffle bag had a big black jacket inside, likely to protect what was underneath. Under the jacket was an old laptop and camcorder, and both items appeared to be from the early two-thousands. There was also an abundance of camcorder tapes labeled with strange titles like ‘2013 Stories’, and, ‘New York Experiments’. Deeper in the duffle bag was a yellow folder full of letters and a ton of random driver’s licenses. I didn’t look at all of them, but they were all from different people and the oldest license was from nineteen seventy-six.
At this point, I was kind of scared. Why did someone have all of these items? There were two zipper pockets remaining on the bag, one on the left and one on the right. The right pocket held more letters, licenses, and a hockey mask. The left pocket held a ski mask, a cell phone, and a weapon.
Frightened, my co-worker and I hiked until we had cell service and called local law enforcement. I was nervous I would get in trouble for disturbing a crime scene, but the police officers seemed unphased about the situation.
The next day, we hiked out with law enforcement and showed them the shelter, bookbag, and duffle bag.
They put the contents in a box, thanked me, and said, ‘This is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.’
This was less than a year ago, and I never found out if law enforcement solved this case or not.”
Going Batty
“This happened about a year after I started going camping by myself. At this point, I had heard all the scary stories. I knew camping alone as a woman could be dangerous. Before every camping trip, I did my research and went in as safe as possible. I was not a weapon person, but I brought loud alarms, pepper spray, and checked in with park rangers every time I went camping. I always made sure I was very aware of my surroundings.
I usually went camping in the late autumn months because I hated the heat and loved backpacking to my campsite.
Camping in the off-season meant I was often the only source of light around for wildlife. All the moths and other bugs would surround my campfire, and all the bats would surround my tent until I put out my fire and turned off the lights. It was creepy the first year I started camping alone, but I didn’t mind it anymore.
After all the bats had eaten the all the bugs I had drawn to my little oasis, they usually retreated back into their trees and remained quiet the remainder of the night. This night, about an hour after they retreated, they suddenly began beating their wings and screeching. There must have been something outside my tent! I gathered my sprays alarm, but concluded they might have just been nesting over my tent. I was frightened, but I tried to shake off the feeling.
About an hour later, I heard screaming. Human screaming. I tried to call the park ranger number, but I didn’t have cell phone signal.
I checked in with the park rangers the next morning and they explained, ‘We didn’t have any strange reports last night. The bats were probably just nesting.’
I had strange vibes for the rest of the trip that I couldn’t shake. I went back to camp, packed my belongings, and went home.
A few weeks later, it was reported two women went missing in the park while I was there. They were never found.
I still go solo camping, but I always follow my gut.”
Trouble On The Trails
“When I was a teenager, I went hiking often. One of my favorite hiking spots was Indian Falls. It was a nature reserve in Kentucky located about thirty-five or forty minutes away from where I lived. When it rained, an awesome series of waterfalls formed which went about one hundred fifty yards in length and dropped around two hundred feet.
My friends and I would park along the road which led to the trail and hiked to the waterfall. Unfortunately, the trail was often littered with garbage, like refrigerators, old cars, and cans. It was also a hangout spot teenagers would often graffiti, but it was never occupied any time I visited.
One day, my friends and I decided to hike down to the bottom of the waterfall. We thought there might be some random interesting plants growing at the bottom and wanted to check it out. We couldn’t find anything, so we decided to head back to my car. As we were hiking down the trail, I caught a glimpse of an object on my car I couldn’t exactly make out. When we got closer, I could see a cloud of flies hovering over a dark mass. Finally, when we were about fifty feet away from the car, I could tell what it was.
Someone had left the bloody head of a deer on the hood of my car.
I took it as a strong message to stay away, and I have never been back.”
Creepy Canyon Tour
“This story occurred nearly two decades ago. At this time, the Grand Canyon offered donkey tours. You rode a donkey to a certain point on the Grand Canyon trail, then you began hiking. You could camp after the tour, but my partner and I chose to only stay during the day.
A woman who was probably in her late sixties or early seventies was in front of me on her donkey. At this point, the part of the canyon we were riding on was a steep incline next to a cliff. She started to sway left and right on the donkey for about a minute. We thought she looked safe despite the swaying because the trail was rather wide. Suddenly, she passed out and slumped over on the donkey. In doing so, she fell off the donkey and pulled it down with her. The woman and the donkey tumbled over the side of the cliff, falling over one hundred feet down.
The tour guide jumped off her donkey and let out an audible scream. A few people tried to peer over the side of the cliff to look, and the tour guide stopped them. The guide made some radio calls to the authorities, and everyone left the scene. It was obvious something very serious had happened, but we never found out.”
Freaky Forest Creature
“When I was a kid, my cousins and I would hike out to the woods to play. This particular night, we went out to the woods around midnight and played freeze tag with flashlights. At this time, I was about seven years old. My cousin and I went to the far side of the woods and pointed our flashlights up at the trees. Only seconds later, we both saw a huge shadow move across the woods. It looked like a gigantic black dog! We heard a low growl and immediately screamed and ran towards my house.
My cousins chased behind us and asked, ‘What happened? Why were you both screaming?’
We replied, ‘It looked like a huge black dog! It was giant, moved quietly, and was creepy. All we heard was a growl!’
My cousins never heard or saw anything. To this day, I still don’t know what I saw in the woods.”
