The storm rolled through the state park in the middle of the night, and by the time we woke, the rain was driving sideways and the water was already creeping under the tent walls. I was eight years old, a Girl Scout on a weekend camping trip in the nineties, before anyone had cell phones. The rangers had evacuated every campsite hours earlier, everyone except us and the Boy Scouts in the site next to ours. The Boy Scouts were older, twelve to sixteen, and we were little, seven to nine.
They helped us pack our gear into the cars as fast as we could, but the roads were impossible. We couldn’t tell how deep the water was, and we had no idea if the road had washed out somewhere ahead. So we abandoned the vehicles and pulled out the map the scout leaders carried. A few miles away there were treehouse cabins, built around trees and lofted about fifteen feet off the ground.
That was our only shot. The wind was so strong the smaller girls couldn’t stay on their feet, so the older boys and the adults carried us. The rain soaked through every layer we had. When we finally reached the cabins, the adults broke in and found emergency supplies, mostly space blankets.
There was no firewood anywhere, and starting a fire was forbidden anyway, the year had been so dry they were worried about forest fires. I remember shivering for hours. All of us girls huddled in the middle of the floor, the boys packed around the outside trying to keep us warm. One of them asked if we knew any Girl Scout songs.
Either that was a real thing or they were just being nice, but we sang every song we knew, and the leaders taught us a few more. At some point we convinced the boys to sing in rounds with us. Morning came slow, the rain softened to a drizzle, and a ranger showed up to check the damage. He found us, drove off, and came back with a fleet of all-terrain vehicles.
They took us to a place where doctors were waiting to check everyone over. By some miracle, none of us had anything worse than the chills. We could have died in our sleep if the water had come all at once instead of rising gradually. If the Boy Scouts hadn’t been there, the little ones never would have made the hike.
If we’d tried to drive, the flood would have taken us. We were unbelievably lucky. Two years ago I was tree planting out of a bush camp in Saskatchewan, and it was the second-to-last night of the season. A few of us had stayed up late drinking around the fire.
After everyone else went to bed, I walked to my tent to grab another beer before putting out the fire. As I came back out, I saw something running through the center of camp that was definitely not one of the dogs. I ducked back inside to grab a flashlight, and when I stood up, there was a black bear staring at me from less than five feet away. I ran back to the fire and waited.
It didn’t follow me, but a few minutes later I heard it trying to get into the garbage box. I walked over cautiously, without the flashlight, like an idiot in a horror movie. The bear was nowhere in sight. I got right next to the box and tried to shift the lid back into place, and it wasn’t until the bear turned its head and I caught its eye that I realized my hand was inches from its back paw.
We both froze. We stared at each other for what felt like minutes. I could see the intelligence in its eyes, the way it was sizing up the situation exactly like I was. There was a strange, quiet understanding between us.
Then I shouted, and it ran off. I stayed awake until five in the morning, scaring it away every half hour, then got up at seven for the last day of the season. Last year a friend and I drove a long road trip to New Mexico, camping most of the way. Our first night we ended up at White Rocks Campground in the Jefferson National Forest, deep in the mountains of West Virginia.
We’d grabbed some pamphlets at a gas station, and this place was a forty-kilometer drive up a dirt road into nowhere. On the way in we saw almost no cars, just one truck that followed us for about fifteen minutes before turning down another road. We passed a coal factory with a sign reading sixty-two days since an on-site incident. The only people we saw were standing on the side of the road, huddled around a plastic bin that was on fire.
We thought it was all weird, but we were so excited about the trip we just laughed it off. The campground had about thirty sites and was completely empty. We drove around all of them looking for anyone, then picked a random spot and decided to stay. When we got out of the car and stood there, the silence was startling.
I love being in the woods and have never felt scared out there, but this was different. No birds. Just thick, silent woods. Straight-up Blair Witch.
It was getting dark fast, so we started setting up. I handled the fire while my friend put up the tent. We both kept stopping to listen. My friend pointed out that at least the crunchy leaves would warn us if anyone approached.
I told myself we were just freaking ourselves out, but I had goosebumps. The whole time I had the feeling someone was watching us. I wanted to leave, but I kept my cool for my friend. Turned out she was doing the same thing for me.
Once the fire was going and the tent was up, the sun had fully set. The darkness pressed in so tight it felt suffocating. My friend pulled out a book and started reading aloud to calm us down. I grabbed my headlamp and kept sweeping it around, looking for whatever I felt out there.
Finally we decided to just forget it and go to sleep. We’d pack up at first light and leave. I grabbed the one knife we had, still in the car, and kept it beside me in the tent. As we lay in our sleeping bags, my friend pulled out her phone to check for reception.
Nothing. She tried to dial her boyfriend anyway, for no real reason. I remember saying out loud, We have no reception out here. It won’t work.
The call disconnected. And right then, maybe six meters to the left of our tent, there were footsteps. Not the quiet kind that build up slowly. The kind that sound like someone had been standing behind a tree near us and just started walking.
Those crunchy leaves were doing their job. We froze, stared at each other, eyes wide. The footsteps walked toward the tent, then turned and went behind it for a few meters before stopping. Heavy, booted footsteps.
The pattern of a person walking, not a bear or a deer. My friend grabbed the knife and her headlamp, unzipped the tent, and got out. She stood in front of the tent, knife out, looking around like a warrior. About forty-five seconds of silence passed.
We listened for more footsteps or voices. I could see the beam of her headlamp darting around the trees, but there was nothing there. She stuck her head back in and said, We’re getting the heck out of here. We packed everything in record time, maybe ten minutes, and flew out of there.
I’m amazed we didn’t lose our heads. We kept our cool while packing, but we were screaming internally. Every second I pictured someone grabbing us and pulling us into the darkness. The only thing that kept me calm was the feeling that this couldn’t actually be happening.
Not on our first night. As we pulled out of the campsite, there were two black, dirty trucks pulled off to the side of the road, half hidden in the trees. They definitely hadn’t been there when we arrived, and the nearest homes were about twenty-four kilometers away. We didn’t stop to look.
We just drove. We got to a motel and told the owner the story. He was incredibly sweet, comforting, and even gave us some cash the next morning in case we needed another place to stay. I promised him a good review.
I remember every detail of that night: the feeling of being watched, the footsteps so close, the black trucks. My wife, our dog, and I were on the second day of an eighty-kilometer hike in Killarney Provincial Park in Northern Ontario. We set up camp on a point jutting about 750 meters into a lake, one way on, one way off. Since about nine p.
m. we’d been hearing wolves, and by the time we went to bed the howls were getting closer. Then one howl came from right behind us on the trail down to the point. I got out of the tent, made a lot of noise, tried to scare it off.
That usually works with bears, and we’ve had plenty of bear encounters. I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, went back to bed and lay down, trying to act confident so my wife wouldn’t worry. That’s when we both heard something outside the tent. Our dog was silent but shaking.
I opened the tent and found a wolf staring at me from about fifteen feet away. I grabbed the bear spray and took aim. I didn’t use it, but I started screaming and charged at it a few times. Again, that usually works with a black bear when you have no escape.
This wolf didn’t care. It hung around for a few seconds, then casually walked into the tree line just far enough that I couldn’t see it anymore. I built a fire between the tent and the bush and sat up all night with my headlamp on. Three or four wolves howled back and forth every twenty minutes or so, very close.
The one I saw, I’d estimate within fifty yards. I was sure they were going to come for the dog. At about six in the morning they all started howling together, way more than during the night, maybe eight to ten wolves. We waited until eight, packed up fast, and got out of there.
We’d hiked thirty-six kilometers in over two days. We hiked out in six and a half hours. About an hour and a half into the hike out, the wolves started howling behind us again. They were following us out.
On the way we saw a bear with two cubs. Normally that would concern us, but we just thought, get out of my way. My wife lost all her toenails on that hike, and our dog picked up some serious anxiety about being in a tent. I was camping with two college friends way out in the mountains of Trinity County in far northern California.
It wasn’t an established campsite, just a nice spot many miles down a dirt road off Route 299, which is isolated to begin with. There might not have been another soul for miles. It’s rural, rugged country, part of a region where a lot of weed is grown illegally, which can sometimes make things dangerous. We got there late in the day, a nice little clearing along a stream.
After dark we sat around the fire talking, and a large animal suddenly exploded out of the brush and stopped right outside our fire circle. Then it was gone, and we didn’t hear it leave, not even a twig cracking. We searched around with our lights. My one friend, a local who grew up in the backwoods, thought it was a puma.
That was a tad unnerving, but we laughed it off, drank beer, and eventually crashed out. I was in a two-person tent with one friend, and the local was in a tiny single-person tent next to us. We fell asleep fast for a few hours. Out of nowhere I woke right up.
There were footsteps right outside the tents. I don’t know why, but I had a very strong intuition not to call out to my friend in the other tent to ask if it was him, even though him going out to take a piss would have been the obvious explanation. Then the person walking called out, and I almost lost it. It wasn’t my friend.
It was some random guy. He circled our tents for the next five minutes calling, Hello. Hello. Over and over in a disconcertingly calm, measured voice.
We were in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. I stayed totally silent, knife in hand, waiting for an attack. My tentmate slept through all of it. The guy left with no sound of a vehicle, and somehow dawn arrived.
The next day I asked my buddy in the other tent if he’d heard the guy walking around. He had, and he’d had the same instinct as me. My tentmate was confused. He said, WTF, why didn’t you wake me up?
We’ll help the guy out or kick his ass. I couldn’t explain it. The other friend backed me up right away, said the guy’s movements and voice had a really weird vibe. This friend wasn’t the type to get scared or avoid a confrontation, so my tentmate let it go, and we spent a few minutes basking in the weirdness of it all.
I still wonder what that guy wanted and what would have happened if we’d responded. It’s not easy to burst out of a zipped-up tent. Maybe that little hang-up saved our asses. A few friends and I went on an afternoon hike and got completely lost, still lost past midnight.
There were five of us with one working flashlight. We were on a trail in high, hilly country overlooking the land below, and we were about to settle in and wait for sunrise. Then a car came out of nowhere a few hundred feet below us. It was a truck.
It stopped with its headlights on. We thought about running down to flag it down for help, but then we heard shouting from the truck. An argument. We kept watching, trying to decide what to do.
Then we heard a loud pop and saw a flash. The shouting stopped. We froze, completely silent. A few minutes later, one person got out of the truck with a flashlight and started scanning the area.
We got up as quietly as we could and walked away, backtracking the way we came, praying the person with the flashlight wouldn’t come up to our trail. We walked nonstop until sunrise in total paranoia until we finally hit a road and found our way back. To this day I have no idea what happened there. I grew up camping on a particular island in South Carolina.
My family would spend weeks there at a time, and I knew the woods bordering the beach like the back of my hand. That detail matters. One summer my best friend came with me. She was sixteen, I was fifteen.
She’d never been camping, and I’d camped all over the Southeast. We woke up early one morning and went down to the beach to watch the sunrise without waking my parents. A man came over the dunes. Mid-forties, shorts, t-shirt, a belt knife strapped on.
That isn’t odd, it’s the South. He had a country look, not a vacationing tourist. He said good morning. We said it back and kept walking.
A couple minutes later I looked behind me and noticed he was walking the same way. At first I thought he was just beach walking. Then I noticed he was closer. It kept happening.
I said something to my friend and we started walking faster. He kept pace. Then I realized he was gaining on us. I told my friend, We keep going.
When I turn right, follow me. We’re going to cut through the woods. I knew the woods there well enough that if we cut through at that point, we’d come out at the staffed ranger station. He was really coming at us now, so I grabbed her hand and we ran.
She was panicking. We shouldn’t go into the woods. I said, There’s nobody on the beach and we need an adult. We booked it through the woods.
I took every shortcut I knew, ducked under everything, and I could hear him crashing through the woods behind us. We spilled out by the ranger station and I started screaming. The ranger came out. The woods behind us went quiet, and the man never emerged.
Two things I took from that: he was definitely up to something, and dodging into that thick saltwater forest was possibly the riskiest thing I’ve ever done. When I was about seven we moved from England to South Africa. School started at a different time of year, so we went on a three-month camping trip through Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique with family friends. The scariest part was in Botswana.
In the middle of the Kalahari, we were watching lions from the roof of our Land Rover at sunset. They started chasing us, so we drove off back toward camp, about ten kilometers away. That night my sister and I were asleep in the tent while the adults stayed up. One of the women was on the bush toilet, a shovel and a camping chair with a hole in it, when she found herself surrounded by those same lions.
The lions left, and she made it back, terrified but alive. Then the whole pride walked through the campsite. My mom dove into the tent to keep us from wandering outside. The British couple hid in the Land Rover, while my dad and godfather climbed on top, banging pans, making noise, shining spotlights.
Eventually the lions left. I remember the noise from centimeters away. The lion sniffing the outside of the tent, separated from my face by a few millimeters of canvas, with help at least forty kilometers away. It was pretty scary.
The lions also stole our tent bag, but we found it lying in the road when we left the park. This isn’t my story, it’s my dad’s. He and my grandparents were camping by Lake Tahoe, and all day my grandpa felt like they were being watched, a general feeling that something was off. That night they built a big fire and got in their tents, and then they started hearing strange noises.
They described it as a wolf howling, but ten times deeper. My grandpa decided to keep the fire lit all night. He stayed up to protect the family, and because he was afraid. Around 3:45 he opened the tent flap and looked out at what he said was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen.
A large, black, humanoid figure was walking in circles around the fire. It had no distinguishable features except a giant pair of yellow eyes. Then an awful smell filled the air, like something that had been rotting for years. The last thing my grandpa saw before he ducked back into the tent was the figure returning to the woods, where three other figures exactly like it were waiting.
He loaded his gun. Nothing else happened. They left the next day. The story still gives me nightmares.
Not super creepy, but here it goes. I went camping once with my parents, my brother, and almost my mom’s entire side of the family, a big group. Somewhere in Merced, California, for four days. My cousin booked the spot because there was a small lake for the kids and it was a nice location, right by the parking lot with a store and bathrooms nearby.
He failed to mention we were in front of a cemetery. Everything was fine until the second night. It was getting dark and we were setting up for a fire when my cousin’s son, about four years old, started running toward the parking lot. My dad saw him, saw no adult watching, and went after him.
He asked the kid why he was running, and the kid said he was trying to catch a ball. My dad looked around, couldn’t find a ball, kept asking the kid to point it out. The kid said the ball moved and ran after it. That’s when my dad freaked out, because the kid was clearly chasing an invisible ball, running toward the cemetery.
He grabbed the kid and brought him back but said nothing, figuring it was just a kid being a kid. The next night, same thing, but this time in the direction of the lake. The kid said there was a boy who kept kicking it that way. My dad told my cousin, and she asked her son about it, but he suddenly refused to talk and acted like nothing happened.
They forgot about it until the next evening, when as soon as it got dark, the kid started screaming and hiding his face against his mom. When she asked what was wrong, he just pointed at something and screamed. Every time he looked up, he cried and screamed again. He didn’t leave the tent for the rest of the night.
We never found out what he saw, but other odd things happened to other people in the group, and we left the next morning. When I was about fourteen, I was hunting with my dad and brothers. My oldest brother already had a deer hanging, and we were settling into our tent for the night. At some point something started making noise outside.
A group down the road had dogs, so we assumed that was it. Then it started rubbing against our tent, and my dad elbowed it as hard as he could. It took off. We went back to sleep.
In the morning, my brother’s deer was gone. The ground around the tree where it had hung, and around our tent, was covered in bear tracks. About five years later I was elk hunting with my uncle and his friends. One day I went out with his buddy Tyler.
Tyler got an elk down about thirty minutes before dark. We walked up to it and started field dressing, and then we heard wolves howl in the distance, slowly getting closer. Every minute, the smell of death got thicker, the sky got darker, and the wolves got closer. By full dark, all I could see was what was in the beam of my small flashlight and Tyler’s headlamp as he worked as fast as he could while I kept watch.
We were surrounded. I don’t know how many there were, it felt like dozens. Probably only a few. I heard them running circles around us, yelping back and forth.
Occasionally I caught a glimpse of them in the light, then they were gone. Every once in a while one would dart in within a few yards and try to snag a piece of the elk. Finally Tyler finished and we made a scent circle around the carcass to protect it as best we could. Then we hiked three miles back to camp, covered in elk blood, trailed by wolves the whole way.
By far the most horrifying experience of my life. Back when I was younger, it was my best friend’s fifteenth birthday. Instead of a party, her mom let her go camping without parents with a few friends. She invited me and two others, who both backed out last minute.
So it was just the two of us alone in the woods. Not a campground, just a large forest about sixteen kilometers away. We set up camp, night fell, and we fell asleep. Hours later my friend was shaking me awake.
I sat up and she clamped a hand over my mouth before I could speak. She pointed to the side of the tent. The inside was lit by an electronic lantern we’d left on overnight, and outside the tent was the clear silhouette of a figure standing there. We didn’t dare move or reach for our phones, scared we’d make a sound.
We just sat frozen, silently crying, as we started hearing a man’s deep, slow breathing. I thought I was going to die that night. I prayed in my head, just let me live to see tomorrow. I don’t know how long he stood there.
It felt like twenty minutes. Then he moved and walked away. As soon as his footsteps faded, I scrambled for my phone and texted my mom to call 911. It was three in the morning.
We didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Maybe we were being paranoid, but I’ll always wonder what he might have done. After the police arrived and interviewed us, they searched the woods. They found nothing, but on the ground, about forty-six meters away, they discovered a large garbage bag.
Weeks later we learned the bag was full of girls’ panties and fingernails. The police ran forensic DNA tests, but nothing came up. We’ll never know who that man was or where that bag came from.
I suffer from extreme anxiety and paranoia now, and I’ve never gone camping since.