Post by Joanna on Jun 22, 2014 23:07:50 GMT -5
Camping Tales of the Paranormal
Make no mistake ... there are weird things out there in the wilderness. We’re not talking about wildlife – not the ordinary kind anyway. In fact, in some cases we’re not talking about wildlife at all, but something possibly far stranger. Out there in the woods and lurking on the side of the road are entities and creatures of which nightmares are made. So the next time you go camping, keep these experiences in mind.
Witch or Skinwalker. Ann was living at an ashram in Virginia when she had a very frightening experience with what she calls a “witch,” although she cannot be sure what this thing really was. “I was camping in one of the screen cabins that night, near the dorms,” she recalls, “when I started to have a very bad dream. A witch was flying toward me from the greenhouse about a mile below, near the farm. She was a typical scary, evil witch, black pointed hat and everything, and was making horrible sounds, high-pitched and frightening.”
As it turns out, something real was invading Ann’s dream. “I woke with a start only to find that, the sound was real and was coming toward me very rapidly from the direction of the farm, as if something was flying straight toward me. My first instinct was one of pure terror – terror for my very life and soul. “The thing flew quickly toward my cabin until it was very near, but I managed to pray in my mind with great faith, ‘Please, God, help me!’ The very moment that I thought that, the horrible noise instantly was far away from me, back down by the farm, but I could still hear it in the distance.”
It seems Ann wasn’t the only one terrified that night. “In the morning,” Ann says, “I was having breakfast when my friend asked me why I looked so tired. I told him I’d had bad dreams that an evil witch was trying to get me. He said, ‘That’s weird because I was having this dream about a witch, too, and then I woke up and through my window I heard this horrible sound.’ So we’d both heard it.”
Ann recalls a discovery that elevates her suspicions. “One morning in December or January, I went alone down to the farm and saw something very strange. There were bare human footprints coming out of the woods in the freshly fallen snow. The footprints made a perfect circle and transformed into what looked like deer footprints that returned to the forest. I was baffled and didn’t make the connection to the ‘witch’ at first until I heard of Native American skinwalkers that could change into animals.”
The Demon on the Highway. Carson recalls the experience of two summer camp counselors who encountered something very spooky while driving through South Carolina one night. The counselors, Jeff and John, were devout fundamentalist Christians, so the entity they saw seemed to them less than holy.
“As they were driving down the highway,” Carson says, “they saw a sketchy looking guy dressed all in black clothing – black hoodie, black pants, black shoes – on the side of the road. There were no other cars on the road at the time, so they decided to slow down because they thought the man might be a hitchhiker. They had been watching the man for about 30 seconds, as they were going very slowly, when John said, ‘Dude, I think that guy is a demon or something.’ Immediately, the guy turned around. All they could see was his huge, bright, white smile. That was literally the only thing they could see on his face. As he turned around, the thing cupped his hand over his ear, as if he had heard them. They both just looked at each other and almost simultaneously said, ‘Let’s get out of here!’ They took a U-turn right where they were and sped off in the other direction.”
Ghost Hitchhiker and Car. A reader by the name of Homeboy also tells of a freaky roadside encounter at their campsite. This event took place in August 2000 in St. Francis, South Dakota.
“We as a family sundanced every August,” Homeboy says. “This time around, my younger brother Donald and his family came to support us. It was hot and muggy, so Donald asked if he and his family could sleep on the porch of my house as I was already camped at the sundance site. In the early hours of that following morning, our dog was barking non-stop. As this was annoying, Donald sat up, ready to tell the dog to ‘shut up,’ but something on the nearby road caught his eye.
“A woman in a white dress was walking south, but she was floating about a foot over the blacktop! He could see the feet of this woman moving, but they were not touching the road! In a panic, he nudged his companion awake and told her to look. As they both looked in disbelief, the woman continued on her way. By this time, another amazing thing happened. A white car came from the north – also about a foot off the road – stopped to give the woman hitchhiker a lift. The woman floated into the open door of the car, and the instant she got in, the car and the woman vanished into thin air! As unbelievable as it sounds, my brother and his companion saw this. They then went inside the house, locked the house, turned on the lights, smudged, and stayed up the remainder of the night. The place where the car vanished is where five people died in a head-on crash in 1968.”
Ghost Sounded the Bugle. In June 2002, Robert and his brother were camped at Medicine Tail Coulee, where they were to participate in an annual reenactment of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. But a reenactment of a most remarkable kind was also going to take place.
“At about 2 or 2:30 in the morning,” Robert says, “I awoke needing to use the latrine. Since all that week we had been wearing our cavalry uniforms, I got dressed and pulled on my cavalry boots, grabbed my hat, and headed for the latrine. About one-third of the way across the open field, I began to hear a bugle. It did not sound like any bugle I had ever heard, and after 24 years in the military I’d heard plenty of them. It was playing ‘Recall’ over and over. I just chalked it up to some of the guys playing a joke on me and continued in my way. On the return trip, I noticed that it had stopped, so I went on to the tent and back to bed. When we awoke about four or five hours later, I told my brother what happened and he agreed that it was the guys playing a joke on me. There was something that was bothering me and that was: How did the guys know what time I’d be going to the latrine? An active duty Army Lt. Colonel invited us to breakfast at his camp and I asked him who was playing the bugle at around 2:30 a.m. When he replied, my blood ran cold. His reply was, ‘There isn’t a bugle even remotely close to us as we speak, and the battlefield closes at 9 p.m. No one can get in there.’ He told me that what (or who) I’d heard was most likely Chief Trumpeter (in 1876 they were called trumpeters) Henry Voss of the 7th Cavalry sounding Recall in the hopes that Reno and Benteen would come to the rescue. He further stated that I was not the first to hear him and most likely would not be the last.”
Thunderbird Sighting in the Woods. Ghosts, demons and skinwalkers are not the only paranormal entities out in the woods. There are unexplained critters as well. Antony and his friend were camping one night under a full moon. So with that bright illumination, they decided to explore the surrounding woods and look for an old, abandoned castle-like building they knew of.
“At first, we were following the deer paths to make it easier to navigate,” Antony says. “The castle was southeast and that was the direction we were walking. We were walking in the woods for about 30 minutes. It was around 1 in the morning and the woods started getting thicker. Suddenly, we heard what sounded to me like a huge branch or tree falling next to us. I instinctively covered my head and crouched. It was extremely loud and I glanced up and saw a huge black bird. It was sitting above us and we seemed to startle it. It flew about 100 feet to a nearby branch. Its wingspan was at least ten feet, and judging how far it was, it looked to be around four feet tall. I did not get a good look at its head, but its silhouette against the moon was hunched over, looking like a giant vulture. Its wings sounded like a flag flapping in the wind and almost a crashing sound. My friend and I have never heard of a bird like this. When we got back, we researched strange birds in Pennsylvania and found that other people have had similar sightings. I think I definitely saw an undiscovered species!”
We Heard Bigfoot’s Rage. In the Fall of 1974, Bryan was living in Oregon and decided to go backpacking on the Pacific Crest trail south of Mt. Hood. He parked his car at the trailhead and made for a small campsite at Frog Lake some miles south to spend the night … when he heard something rather peculiar.
“It was late afternoon when I got started,” Bryan says, “and as dusk approached, I was uncertain how far I was from the lake. The trail was wide, but thick forest grew on either side as the trail was cut into the mountainside. Some time passed, and suddenly I thought I heard voices and wood being broken for a fire. I stopped and identified the sounds as coming from the down slope side of the trail in the thick forest. I listened again and it sounded like two or three people talking, but in the thick forest it was hard to make out what they were saying. I suddenly shouted out, ‘Hey, down there. How far is it to Frog Lake?’ All of a sudden there was a dead silence. A couple of minutes passed in the fading light, then the sounds started up again. The voices were talking, but this time I listened more closely trying to understand them. I couldn’t. The voices sounded like muttering punctuated with sibilant kinds of sounds, not hissing ... more like ‘S’ kind of consonant sounds. It was also very fast speech, sounding remotely like New Guinea mountain people (if you’ve ever seen any National Geographic shows on that region). More unnerving, though, was the pitch of the voices. It was low; in fact, at the very lowest register of the human voice, which told me these were very large individuals. Of course, I was charged with the realization that these individuals were, in fact, not humans, but more likely Bigfoot people. The wood sounds came back again, but whereas I thought at first they were the sounds of wood being broken for a fire, these sounds were more like a shearing, tearing of wood. In other words, branches being stripped off a tree! These were powerful beings and it made my blood run cold to think of how big they must have been.
“With all the speed I could muster while carrying a 50-pound pack, I moved my butt down the trail as fast as I could. I’d look back every few yards in the now dim light to see if a gigantic shadowy figure was headed in my direction. Fortunately, there wasn’t. Soon enough, I came to the lake after about a quarter of a mile and saw one lonely little campfire at the lake. I made a beeline straight for it. It turned out to be a guy from Washington State about my age. I pitched my tent nearby after asking him if it was okay. He readily agreed and bid me to come over to the fire for some coffee. After a few pleasantries, I mentioned my prior encounter and he just stopped in the middle of raising his cup to his lips and with saucer eyes he said, ‘You heard it, too?’ At that moment by that campfire, alone in the woods, long after vacationers had left the mountains, we bonded in the realization that we were nothing but a couple of Cub Scouts cut off from our troop ... possibly never to be seen again.”
Source: Stephen Wagner, ParanormalPhenomena, June 2014.
