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<p>Convening with nature can be incredibly peaceful and grounding, the silence of a long hike can give you mental clarity and help put all your daily worries into perspective. Travailing through the forest and smelling all of the fresh air and plants can make you feel more connected with the cycle of life, and give you the presence of moment that we all too often miss.</p><p>However, on the flip side, there are times when exploring nature can be downright terrifying. Anyone who has hiked solo, or set out with a friend only to encounter mysterious sounds, potential attacks, or seemingly supernatural run-ins knows just how real things can get out in the abyss of nature.</p><h2>In <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mwcxk9/dear_redditors_whats_the_most_eerie_unsettling/" target="_blank">a popular Reddit thread</a>, people shared the eeriest and most unsettling things they&#39;ve encountered while hiking or exploring the forest.</h2><h2>1. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/mostlygray/">mostlygray</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>The walking things that follow you.</p> <p>Almost every day, my friend and I used to walk in the woods by his place. When walking, we&#39;d hear the sound of footsteps alongside us, behind us, ahead of us, all around. It sounded like people walking in the woods. If we stopped walking, the sound of steps would stop. If one of us walked and the other stood still, there was no sound of footsteps. We both had to walk.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>This went on for years. We&#39;d stand still and look everywhere and see nothing. Nothing but the trees. Take a few steps, and we&#39;d immediately hear people walking around us.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>One day, we were walking down the road, instead of in the woods and we heard the same noise of footsteps from the woods. We looked into the woods and there was a little tiny bird. It was hopping in the leaves at exactly the human walking pace.</p> <p>Two years of worry for a 4-inch tall hopping bird. They didn&#39;t live in my woods, but they were all over his woods. It was nice to solve a problem with a happy ending.</p> </blockquote><h2>2. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Enemabot/">Enemabot</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>A mountain lion against a tree, but it was already dead, and mummified.</p> </blockquote><h2>3. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Moose_on_a_walk/">Moose_on_a_walk</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>More of a recurring experience; hearing sounds near my tent in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. My experience and knowledge of the area might tell me that it&#39;s an animal, but my ears might be 100% convinced that it&#39;s the footsteps of another man walking up to my tent. It&#39;s like having a bad trip on drugs. Takes some mental gymnastics to get through. Definitely my least favourite part about solo hiking.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>4. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/yogorilla37/">yogorilla37</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Belanglo State Forest south of Sydney is notorious for being the site of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpacker_murders" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" target="_blank">Backpacker Murders</a> where six bodies were found in the early 90s. A few years back I was part of a large (1000+ people) Scout camp in the forest. It&#39;s a nice spot but it still feels odd, everyone knows the history of the place, even the kids are joking about killers in the woods.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>About 9PM there&#39;s a queue for the toilets so I duck into the woods to relieve myself. About 30 meters into the trees I look down and realize I&#39;m standing in a small scattered field of bones. It probably only took a few seconds for me to realize they were animal bones but it was the longest few seconds of my life.</p> </blockquote><h2>5. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Vulpine-Poltergeist/">Vulpine-Poltergeist</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Few years back, wife and I were taking a night walk (we were bored, she had a knife, and I&#39;m more awake at night like a f**king gremlin). We get up to a canal trail, and two people pass by; but they&#39;re not <em>talking</em> talking, more like...an attempt at sounding like they&#39;re having a conversation with random f**king words. Like, nothing they said made sense, and they seemed coordinated enough that I couldn&#39;t just chalk it up to drugs.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>So, naturally, since I grew up by the woods (not these particular ones, however), I shush my wife, we stay where we are, and they pass us, not even glancing at us or acknowledging us. Same pace, always talking, mismash of words.</p> <p>It was terrifying, to my wife and I at least.</p> </blockquote><h2>6. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/RumPullForceKin/">RumPullForceKin</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Grew up living in rural Arkansas. I lived right on the edge of town at one point and a buddy&#39;s house was a few miles away. Quickest way to get there was walk along the train tracks. So I&rsquo;m walking to his house one night and it&rsquo;s dark. Like <em>dark</em> dark. Wasn&rsquo;t a moon out and there&rsquo;s nothing on either side for a good while but dense woods. It&rsquo;s not unusual to hear things running around and for the most part they&rsquo;re harmless. But when it&rsquo;s pitch black and middle of the night you don&rsquo;t think &ldquo;harmless&rdquo;.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>I&rsquo;m crunching along on the gravel when I hear something crashing through the woods off to my left. I stop walking to listen and it stops after a second. I start walking along again and something starts rushing through the brush and I hear it crunch through the gravel right in front of me and stop what sounds like a few feet away.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>I froze and am just trying to see anything when I hear a loud snort and it crunches off and into the woods again. An hour later while I&rsquo;m sitting in a house with lights on everywhere I thought about how I wish it was daylight so I could see how close the deer came to me.At the time it happened all I could think was &ldquo;This is it, this is how I die. Some horrible monster is about to drag me into the woods and eat me.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>7. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/BlueCow529/">BlueCow529</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I want to first say this was on a private island while I was at a month long summer camp. Our group went on a overnight campout in the woods. So as we were walking through a particularly dense part of the woods we found a dead fawn. We were all trying to walk around it but it was right on the trail so it was hard to squeeze by, as I walked around the corpse there was a hole about an inch across in the front left shoulder and blood had seeped out. We hiked on and slept the night. Then we went back to the main camp on the same trail and the deer was gone but the blood was still there, we finished out the hike.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Fast forward a few days and as we were walking through trails in the camp we found another dead deer but this deer was a fully grown doe and she had two holes in her, one in the flank and one in the front shoulder, this time I was positive those things were bullet holes. I had been out hunting deer with my grandparents and the holes looked exactly alike. That begs the question who was hunting for sport on a PRIVATE island that hosted a camp for kids.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>8. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/bagged_hay/">bagged_hay</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Some dude just sh**ting in a 5-gallon bucket. not on a trail, no possessions with him. Just like he grabbed his s**t bucket and went to his place to take a s**t.</p> </blockquote><h2>9. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/MoveRough8383/">MoveRough8383</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Found the tent of someone who had passed away a month ago from a flood at the bottom of the hiking trail :(((</p> </blockquote><h2>10. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/zerothepyro/">zerothepyro</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>My brother, a friend of ours, and I were hiking in the woods. Quite deep in and about an hour from any roads and even more so from any buildings.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Came across a house that looked like a tornado had hit it. Beams and drywall everywhere. Even found a toaster.</p> <p>No roads or trails to this house, but it looked like newer construction. We explored for a but then headed back out.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Seemed pretty straight forwards to backtrack to it later on to explore some more, but we have not been able to find it again. We have searched quite seriously for it too, covering quite some area in the area we thought it was in.</p> <p>The odd thing was that it was just the house that had the damage. None of the trees, bushes, or dirt had any sign of damage.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>11. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/SemiAutomaticFarts/">SemiAutomaticFarts</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I fixing fences with my Dad on our farm in the midwest. Walking through the woods in the middle of the day. We noticed a great horned owl on a branch directly above us, like 12 feet away. We slowly kept working and keeping an eye on it. It followed us for like 30 minutes. It always stayed on limbs directly above where we were. After we fixed the fence, we started walking back to our truck. In a tree directly in our path was a baby owl about the size of a football. In that moment, the adult came to land next to the chick and seemed to snuggle up to it as if to say, &quot;don&#39;t come any closer.&quot; We backed away and walked a different route out of the woods. One of the craziest but coolest experiences I&#39;ve ever had.</p> </blockquote><h2>12. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/JanusIsBlue/">JanusIsBlue</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Oh boy, I have one.</p> <p>Okay so me and my family were hiking along a trail during our camping trip and promptly got lost. In our attempt to get back to the road we stumbled upon a really weird place, with stick walls, a tarp tent, a deer carcass in a fire pit, a large &ldquo;DO NOT ENTER&rdquo; sign, and a bunch of other creepy things. We found it odd, but left and went back to the campsite. When we told the family we were staying with, they got really quiet and asked &ldquo;but he didn&rsquo;t see you, did he?&rdquo; We said no, and they were really relieved and said to never go back. They would not elaborate, and just said he was &ldquo;not fond of strangers&rdquo;. Creepy as hell.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>13. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/xj371/">xj371</a>:</h2><p> </p><blockquote> <p>Fresh, deep claw marks on a tree trunk. It was in Northern California, so we assumed it was a mountain lion. We were about 1.5 hours from the trailhead, heading back. There were three of us (two guys, one girl), so enough to be intimidating, but for me that still didn&#39;t erase that gut feeling of knowing I wasn&#39;t the predator in the situation.</p> </blockquote><h2>14. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/ratrancid/">ratrancid</a>:</h2><p> </p><blockquote> <p>I was in the desert camping, and took a hike as it was getting dark. Got quite a ways out and turned on my UV light to see if I could find any scorpions. Turns out they found me because, by the time I turned my light on, there had to have been 10 within five meters of me. Noped out of there real fast while <del>almost</del> pissing my pants.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>15. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/icerope1199/">icerope1199</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I don&rsquo;t know if this counts because it was staged, but when our groups of families would go camp, the adults had a tradition where they would do a &ldquo;scary hike&rdquo; or something like that. One of the dads would go off and pretend to be a monster or something to put on a show for the older kids. Being five/six years old, I was pretty scared, and when we were running from the &ldquo;monster&rdquo; my Dad accidentally tripped. To make it more dramatic, he said, &ldquo;Oh no, go on without me!&rdquo; So we ran and left him behind, and I was bawling because I legitimately thought my dad just died. When I saw him coming back to the campsite I was very confused, but relieved. The worst part was that both my parents had gone to a funeral of a father from our church who had died that morning, so my mom was not happy.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>16. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Ddraig1965/">Ddraig1965</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Land nav at Hurlburt Field in 1991. Came across what looked to be an old campsite with a pair of cowboy boots on sticks like they were drying out. Not unsettling, just weird.</p> </blockquote><h2>17. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/DaneIcaza/">DaneIcaza</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I&#39;m gonna flip the script and describe the time that I was somebody else&#39;s eerie unsettling thing in the woods:</p> <p>I went on a little solo overnight trip up to a small mountain lake. I spent the day hiking up, enjoyed the lake a bit, and settled in to make camp around sundown. I had a camouflaged tarp covering my small hammock in the woods around the lake. In the dark, from the lake itself, I was practically invisible in the trees behind the dark green camo tarp.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Around 2100, I awoke to the sounds of loud laughing and hooting and hollering from the lake. Sounded like some folks having a little party on the water. Kept me awake but I tried to go back to sleep and hoped they went away soon.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>A couple hours later they&#39;re still there, loud as ever and getting more and more drunk. I get out of the hammock, find a big fallen branch, and smack it against a tree, trying to make a loud noise to maybe encourage them to move farther down shore. Works for a moment as they try and find the source of the noise, but soon enough they&#39;re back at it.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>So I stumble out of my hidden shelter, wearing nothing but underwear. Now, I&#39;m a very very pale person. Probably just barely visible through the trees in the moonlight. I get out and start stomping around, smacking trees and grunting/groaning.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>They go silent and I can see them freeze. Looks like they&#39;re looking my way. I fade back into the trees and get under my tarp again. They stay quiet and are gone a few minutes later.</p> <p>I like to imagine they thought I was some kind of creepy monster stalking them. Or maybe they just thought I was some homeless person complaining at them. I really hope they tell the story of the time a scary pale monster was watching them from the trees. Either way, I slept great the rest of the night.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>18. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Xiaocheng1984/">Xiaocheng1984</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Weird woods in upstate NY, infamous. No cars in parking lot. Deep in trails, encounter an old man who stops me to chat. No big deal. He asks me if I&rsquo;m Celtic, huh? No man I don&rsquo;t think so. He says too bad these woods are watching you and they&rsquo;d like you better...how&rsquo;d he get out there I was thinking on the drive home? The rest of the hike I was thinking what a weird thing to say. Now I think wtf.</p> </blockquote><h2>19. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/trey_stylez69420/">trey_stylez69420</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Oh god, this brings back an interesting one. I was on a fun woodland walk with my son (he was about 4 years old at the time) and a close friend of mine. Taking photos, exploring nature, beautiful Summer day. In the middle of the woods my son found a small pile of old photographs -- polaroid style. It was a collection of them, a mix of family, friends, travel, etc. but nearly all had the same man present in them. A few were labeled -- Seattle, 1981. We found these photos in 2016. The photos seemed to have been hidden in the dirt and covered up in a way. I really really hope it was for an art project or film or something. But I still can&#39;t shake the immediate dread that washed over me, as if something had happened. Ended the walk early and got ice cream instead lol.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>20. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/CaptainNemo42/">CaptainNemo42</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>My little brother and I were tossing a baseball around near dusk at the bottom of our property, 30 wooded mountain acres WAY in the middle of nowhere. It had gotten dark enough that we were <em>just</em> about to call it quits when we heard the single most horrifying scream we&#39;ve ever heard - before or since - from the trees just beyond the edge of the clearing.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Imagine a woman screaming in mortal agony, writhing in the most wretched torment imaginable, every tortured scream from horror movies, war movies, anything you&#39;ve ever heard; nothing compared to this. Even now, decades removed from hearing it, the hair on my arms and neck stands up just thinking of it, and it&#39;s made even worse by the realization of <em>what it actually was</em>:</p> <p>A mountain lion. Full-grown female mountain lions scream loudly when they&#39;re in heat, and it sounds like a human woman being torn to pieces by the devil himself. To hear that, two kids alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere, was about as terrifying as it gets.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div>

20 people share the eeriest thing they've seen on a hike or in the woods.

Convening with nature can be incredibly peaceful and grounding, the silence of a long hike can give you mental clarity and help put all your daily worries into perspective. Travailing through the forest and smelling all of the fresh air and plants can make you feel more connected with the cycle of life, and give you the presence of moment that we all too often miss.However, on the flip side, there are times when exploring nature can be downright terrifying. Anyone who has hiked solo, or set out with a friend only to encounter mysterious sounds, potential attacks, or seemingly supernatural run-ins knows just how real things can get out in the abyss of nature.In a popular Reddit thread, people shared the eeriest and most unsettling things they&#39;ve encountered while hiking or exploring the forest.1. From mostlygray: The walking things that follow you. Almost every day, my friend and I used to walk in the woods by his place. When walking, we&#39;d hear the sound of footsteps alongside us, behind us, ahead of us, all around. It sounded like people walking in the woods. If we stopped walking, the sound of steps would stop. If one of us walked and the other stood still, there was no sound of footsteps. We both had to walk.  This went on for years. We&#39;d stand still and look everywhere and see nothing. Nothing but the trees. Take a few steps, and we&#39;d immediately hear people walking around us.  One day, we were walking down the road, instead of in the woods and we heard the same noise of footsteps from the woods. We looked into the woods and there was a little tiny bird. It was hopping in the leaves at exactly the human walking pace. Two years of worry for a 4-inch tall hopping bird. They didn&#39;t live in my woods, but they were all over his woods. It was nice to solve a problem with a happy ending. 2. From Enemabot: A mountain lion against a tree, but it was already dead, and mummified. 3. From Moose_on_a_walk: More of a recurring experience; hearing sounds near my tent in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. My experience and knowledge of the area might tell me that it&#39;s an animal, but my ears might be 100% convinced that it&#39;s the footsteps of another man walking up to my tent. It&#39;s like having a bad trip on drugs. Takes some mental gymnastics to get through. Definitely my least favourite part about solo hiking. 4. From yogorilla37: Belanglo State Forest south of Sydney is notorious for being the site of the Backpacker Murders where six bodies were found in the early 90s. A few years back I was part of a large (1000+ people) Scout camp in the forest. It&#39;s a nice spot but it still feels odd, everyone knows the history of the place, even the kids are joking about killers in the woods.  About 9PM there&#39;s a queue for the toilets so I duck into the woods to relieve myself. About 30 meters into the trees I look down and realize I&#39;m standing in a small scattered field of bones. It probably only took a few seconds for me to realize they were animal bones but it was the longest few seconds of my life. 5. From Vulpine-Poltergeist: Few years back, wife and I were taking a night walk (we were bored, she had a knife, and I&#39;m more awake at night like a f**king gremlin). We get up to a canal trail, and two people pass by; but they&#39;re not talking talking, more like...an attempt at sounding like they&#39;re having a conversation with random f**king words. Like, nothing they said made sense, and they seemed coordinated enough that I couldn&#39;t just chalk it up to drugs.  So, naturally, since I grew up by the woods (not these particular ones, however), I shush my wife, we stay where we are, and they pass us, not even glancing at us or acknowledging us. Same pace, always talking, mismash of words. It was terrifying, to my wife and I at least. 6. From RumPullForceKin: Grew up living in rural Arkansas. I lived right on the edge of town at one point and a buddy&#39;s house was a few miles away. Quickest way to get there was walk along the train tracks. So I&rsquo;m walking to his house one night and it&rsquo;s dark. Like dark dark. Wasn&rsquo;t a moon out and there&rsquo;s nothing on either side for a good while but dense woods. It&rsquo;s not unusual to hear things running around and for the most part they&rsquo;re harmless. But when it&rsquo;s pitch black and middle of the night you don&rsquo;t think &ldquo;harmless&rdquo;.  I&rsquo;m crunching along on the gravel when I hear something crashing through the woods off to my left. I stop walking to listen and it stops after a second. I start walking along again and something starts rushing through the brush and I hear it crunch through the gravel right in front of me and stop what sounds like a few feet away.  I froze and am just trying to see anything when I hear a loud snort and it crunches off and into the woods again. An hour later while I&rsquo;m sitting in a house with lights on everywhere I thought about how I wish it was daylight so I could see how close the deer came to me.At the time it happened all I could think was &ldquo;This is it, this is how I die. Some horrible monster is about to drag me into the woods and eat me.&rdquo; 7. From BlueCow529: I want to first say this was on a private island while I was at a month long summer camp. Our group went on a overnight campout in the woods. So as we were walking through a particularly dense part of the woods we found a dead fawn. We were all trying to walk around it but it was right on the trail so it was hard to squeeze by, as I walked around the corpse there was a hole about an inch across in the front left shoulder and blood had seeped out. We hiked on and slept the night. Then we went back to the main camp on the same trail and the deer was gone but the blood was still there, we finished out the hike.  Fast forward a few days and as we were walking through trails in the camp we found another dead deer but this deer was a fully grown doe and she had two holes in her, one in the flank and one in the front shoulder, this time I was positive those things were bullet holes. I had been out hunting deer with my grandparents and the holes looked exactly alike. That begs the question who was hunting for sport on a PRIVATE island that hosted a camp for kids. 8. From bagged_hay: Some dude just sh**ting in a 5-gallon bucket. not on a trail, no possessions with him. Just like he grabbed his s**t bucket and went to his place to take a s**t. 9. From MoveRough8383: Found the tent of someone who had passed away a month ago from a flood at the bottom of the hiking trail :((( 10. From zerothepyro: My brother, a friend of ours, and I were hiking in the woods. Quite deep in and about an hour from any roads and even more so from any buildings.  Came across a house that looked like a tornado had hit it. Beams and drywall everywhere. Even found a toaster. No roads or trails to this house, but it looked like newer construction. We explored for a but then headed back out.  Seemed pretty straight forwards to backtrack to it later on to explore some more, but we have not been able to find it again. We have searched quite seriously for it too, covering quite some area in the area we thought it was in. The odd thing was that it was just the house that had the damage. None of the trees, bushes, or dirt had any sign of damage. 11. From SemiAutomaticFarts: I fixing fences with my Dad on our farm in the midwest. Walking through the woods in the middle of the day. We noticed a great horned owl on a branch directly above us, like 12 feet away. We slowly kept working and keeping an eye on it. It followed us for like 30 minutes. It always stayed on limbs directly above where we were. After we fixed the fence, we started walking back to our truck. In a tree directly in our path was a baby owl about the size of a football. In that moment, the adult came to land next to the chick and seemed to snuggle up to it as if to say, &quot;don&#39;t come any closer.&quot; We backed away and walked a different route out of the woods. One of the craziest but coolest experiences I&#39;ve ever had. 12. From JanusIsBlue: Oh boy, I have one. Okay so me and my family were hiking along a trail during our camping trip and promptly got lost. In our attempt to get back to the road we stumbled upon a really weird place, with stick walls, a tarp tent, a deer carcass in a fire pit, a large &ldquo;DO NOT ENTER&rdquo; sign, and a bunch of other creepy things. We found it odd, but left and went back to the campsite. When we told the family we were staying with, they got really quiet and asked &ldquo;but he didn&rsquo;t see you, did he?&rdquo; We said no, and they were really relieved and said to never go back. They would not elaborate, and just said he was &ldquo;not fond of strangers&rdquo;. Creepy as hell. 13. From xj371:  Fresh, deep claw marks on a tree trunk. It was in Northern California, so we assumed it was a mountain lion. We were about 1.5 hours from the trailhead, heading back. There were three of us (two guys, one girl), so enough to be intimidating, but for me that still didn&#39;t erase that gut feeling of knowing I wasn&#39;t the predator in the situation. 14. From ratrancid:  I was in the desert camping, and took a hike as it was getting dark. Got quite a ways out and turned on my UV light to see if I could find any scorpions. Turns out they found me because, by the time I turned my light on, there had to have been 10 within five meters of me. Noped out of there real fast while almost pissing my pants. 15. From icerope1199: I don&rsquo;t know if this counts because it was staged, but when our groups of families would go camp, the adults had a tradition where they would do a &ldquo;scary hike&rdquo; or something like that. One of the dads would go off and pretend to be a monster or something to put on a show for the older kids. Being five/six years old, I was pretty scared, and when we were running from the &ldquo;monster&rdquo; my Dad accidentally tripped. To make it more dramatic, he said, &ldquo;Oh no, go on without me!&rdquo; So we ran and left him behind, and I was bawling because I legitimately thought my dad just died. When I saw him coming back to the campsite I was very confused, but relieved. The worst part was that both my parents had gone to a funeral of a father from our church who had died that morning, so my mom was not happy. 16. From Ddraig1965: Land nav at Hurlburt Field in 1991. Came across what looked to be an old campsite with a pair of cowboy boots on sticks like they were drying out. Not unsettling, just weird. 17. From DaneIcaza: I&#39;m gonna flip the script and describe the time that I was somebody else&#39;s eerie unsettling thing in the woods: I went on a little solo overnight trip up to a small mountain lake. I spent the day hiking up, enjoyed the lake a bit, and settled in to make camp around sundown. I had a camouflaged tarp covering my small hammock in the woods around the lake. In the dark, from the lake itself, I was practically invisible in the trees behind the dark green camo tarp.  Around 2100, I awoke to the sounds of loud laughing and hooting and hollering from the lake. Sounded like some folks having a little party on the water. Kept me awake but I tried to go back to sleep and hoped they went away soon.  A couple hours later they&#39;re still there, loud as ever and getting more and more drunk. I get out of the hammock, find a big fallen branch, and smack it against a tree, trying to make a loud noise to maybe encourage them to move farther down shore. Works for a moment as they try and find the source of the noise, but soon enough they&#39;re back at it.  So I stumble out of my hidden shelter, wearing nothing but underwear. Now, I&#39;m a very very pale person. Probably just barely visible through the trees in the moonlight. I get out and start stomping around, smacking trees and grunting/groaning.  They go silent and I can see them freeze. Looks like they&#39;re looking my way. I fade back into the trees and get under my tarp again. They stay quiet and are gone a few minutes later. I like to imagine they thought I was some kind of creepy monster stalking them. Or maybe they just thought I was some homeless person complaining at them. I really hope they tell the story of the time a scary pale monster was watching them from the trees. Either way, I slept great the rest of the night. 18. From Xiaocheng1984: Weird woods in upstate NY, infamous. No cars in parking lot. Deep in trails, encounter an old man who stops me to chat. No big deal. He asks me if I&rsquo;m Celtic, huh? No man I don&rsquo;t think so. He says too bad these woods are watching you and they&rsquo;d like you better...how&rsquo;d he get out there I was thinking on the drive home? The rest of the hike I was thinking what a weird thing to say. Now I think wtf. 19. From trey_stylez69420: Oh god, this brings back an interesting one. I was on a fun woodland walk with my son (he was about 4 years old at the time) and a close friend of mine. Taking photos, exploring nature, beautiful Summer day. In the middle of the woods my son found a small pile of old photographs -- polaroid style. It was a collection of them, a mix of family, friends, travel, etc. but nearly all had the same man present in them. A few were labeled -- Seattle, 1981. We found these photos in 2016. The photos seemed to have been hidden in the dirt and covered up in a way. I really really hope it was for an art project or film or something. But I still can&#39;t shake the immediate dread that washed over me, as if something had happened. Ended the walk early and got ice cream instead lol. 20. From CaptainNemo42: My little brother and I were tossing a baseball around near dusk at the bottom of our property, 30 wooded mountain acres WAY in the middle of nowhere. It had gotten dark enough that we were just about to call it quits when we heard the single most horrifying scream we&#39;ve ever heard - before or since - from the trees just beyond the edge of the clearing.  Imagine a woman screaming in mortal agony, writhing in the most wretched torment imaginable, every tortured scream from horror movies, war movies, anything you&#39;ve ever heard; nothing compared to this. Even now, decades removed from hearing it, the hair on my arms and neck stands up just thinking of it, and it&#39;s made even worse by the realization of what it actually was: A mountain lion. Full-grown female mountain lions scream loudly when they&#39;re in heat, and it sounds like a human woman being torn to pieces by the devil himself. To hear that, two kids alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere, was about as terrifying as it gets. 