National parks and forests can be both beautiful and terrifying at times. Chirping birds, friendly squirrels, pleasant trails, and impressive views aren’t the only things that you get. When you actually have to work there every day, you see many more bizarre things than most visitors ever do.
Park rangers, wildlife workers, and search and rescue officers took to a few online threads to share the weirdest and spookiest things they’ve witnessed while on the job. We’ve picked out their scariest experiences to share with you. Keep scrolling to read their creepiest work stories.
#1
I work in a National Forest in California. Every day I drive on a very narrow, very twisty road that snakes through a river gorge. There are gaurd rails on some sections of the road but majority of it has a steep drop off into the canyon.
This summer I was making my rounds, driving merrily up the road when I see a person with a blue sheet over their head (think like a Halloween ghost costume but with no eye holes) walking down the center of the road. I jaw drop and frantically honk my horn. There is no way I can swerve without driving off the road. The person steps out of the way just in time for me to avoid side swiping her. Before I can pull over and radio for help a truck comes around a blind curve and hits her, making her tumble down the ravine.
After her body was retrieved and identified we learned that it was a girl who had been missing for over a year.
Image source: wigglewings, Atlantic Ambience
#2
I wasn’t a ranger or anything, but I worked for a ski resort in Colorado for a couple years. One of the places I worked, my boss and I rode snowmobiles up the gulch road every day to get to the restaurant we worked at. Anyway, we saw a couple things that were out of the ordinary.
Coming down the road one afternoon a couple miles down, we found a little girl sitting on the side of the road, barefoot in the snow. Apparently she had somehow managed to veer off the ski trails and skied down the road for a little bit. When she realized she was lost, she decided to walk. She walked for a while in her ski boots, but then I guess she figured she could walk faster barefoot? So she took off the boots and her socks and walked a good ways barefoot. She was freezing and terrified when we found her. Poor thing. We radioed for ski patrol and wrapped her up in blankets and gave her some hand warmers while we waited.
Image source: pandorumriver24, iddea photo
#3
I was a backpacking guide and skills instructor for a therapeutic wilderness program. I basically took at risk youth on backpacking expeditions. We had a ton of weird experiences.
This one still bothers me. I was reminded of it by the mystery of the staircases in the woods.
I was leading an expedition over the Devils Elbow from our main base camp into Panthertown Valley. We had decided to spend a day on a nearby detour to some waterfalls.
We’d seen two so far and were deep into a bushwhack looking for a third one. We were struggling through a thicket of briars and brambles when suddenly everything clears. No trees, no bushes, no briars… only an overgrown grassy clearing. Dead in the middle was a rusted old Ferris wheel.
It wasn’t huge, probably only 30ft high and obviously build for smaller children. It was rusty and sun faded with tall grass grown up around its base. We just stood there in silence, unsure of exactly how to process it. There was no reason for that to have been out there. Somebody, at some point hauled that thing in piece by piece and assembled it there. The question is why?
I’ll go ahead and plug my sub here, as it was inspired by the S&R creepypasta. You’ll find more like this there.
r/backwoodscreepy.
Image source: anon, Rahib Yaqubov
#4
Worked at a summer camp for a while as a teen. While walking towards the staff cabins we see a dark figure peering into one of the windows. My buddy and I walk over and see its some dirty looking dude like he just crawled out of the wetlands bordering the camps. We say hello and the dude looks at us and books it into the wetlands.
Pretty sure it was a homeless dude, later that summer another one was caught sleeping in one of the campsites a day before the kids arrived and we had to do walk around each site looking for hobos from there on out.
Image source: Illier1, MART PRODUCTION
#5
Worked for the Park Service for 7 years. For one winter I was stationed down in Kalaloch at Olympic National Park. I was one of only three employees that had full time employment during this time.
I lived on the premise in a small apartment and would often walk over to the main building at night to workout at the gym. It was always empty at this time, nobody else stayed / lived there during the weekend. When I was done I would make my rounds and ensure all the light were out and doors were locked.
Outside of one of the bunkhouses was an unfinished shed that had an overhead light on it. The control for the light was inside the shed and locked. I would turn that light off almost every night, only to find it on in the morning, without fail. It wasn’t on a timer. Nobody else was around that had access.
I’ve spent my whole life working in the woods, I’m completely at home when outside in the dark. I could not walk from my apartment to the main building, at night, without wanting to run every single time.
Random Employees would come to the bunkhouse throughout the winter to stay the night on weekdays while on assignment. Numerous employees complained of bumps in the night and odd noises. Some refused to stay in the 2nd floor entirely. One man even saw an apparition disappear through the wall of his room and refused to stay there any longer. All came to me with their stories, unprompted throughout the winter.
I have many more oddities over the years, just too long to type on mobile.
Image source: StiHL044, Jonas F
#6
I just work for a county park, but I get there before the sunrise and I’ve definitely been weirded out once or twice.
First off–possums, raccoons, foxes, and coyotes all make a variety of peculiar noises, many of which I was not previously familiar with. Some sound like demons, some sound like crying children, some are just kinda their own thing and defy immediate description.
The only creepy thing I’ve ever seen have been lights in the woods. It’s hard to tell how far away they are, I would guess 300-400m, but it’s dark. They’re a yellowish sort of white, and appear to quickly and smoothly fade on and off in the span of about a second. I’ve only ever seen one light at a time, and after it happens once there are no repeats. It’s too bright to be a firefly, not bright enough to be a distant car, and too smooth and random to be someone with a flashlight. My imagination has drifted to stories of will-o’-wisps, but I think it’s probably just some kind of bioluminescence or else an optical illusion brought about by squinting to see through a darkened forest.
#7
I worked for a pizza place in Yosemite National Park. This one kinda off seeming guy came in and asked for mushrooms on his pizza. But like, not just mushrooms. Demanded the thing was absolutely smothered in mushrooms. He told us to remake it twice because there were not enough mushrooms. By the time it was satisfactory for him it was inedible for most people. National Parks attract some weird ones.
Image source: mrramblinrose, ROMAN ODINTSOV
#8
I was doing some fieldwork for my masters thesis on the local river habitat. I have trail cameras out to catch wildlife. On my way to one of my cameras(I was walking) I heard leaf rustling from the top of a tree and then a body of a deer fell from the tree on the ground. I made some noise and walked away. I thought it was either a bobcat or mountain lion and I didn’t want to investigate in case the animal was still there. As far as I know bobcats don’t climb on trees to carry their prey and this was a whitetail that looked pretty heavy. I went there a few hours later and the carcass was gone.
As for mountain lion we only have rumors of one around our parts and although I saw tracks, they were not near the camera.
Image source: Deathowler, Ron Lach
#9
When I was 11, I went tent camping with teenage cousins on the Sioux reservation (they lived on the reservation). We were in an area we had followed several trails to find. We were inside the tent and they were telling me a story about shape shifters as the sun was going down. Suddenly, there was a beautiful glow, like when the sun bursts out through clouds and makes everything golden. It highlighted shapes going by the tent and casting shadows, and started as a nice experience. Then there was a loud boom, and the shadow of a large bird came right at us and the tent fell down on top of us. They were genuinely scared, which made me even more terrified. We hightailed it back through those trails and went home in the dark, barely able to breathe we were going so fast.
I still don’t know what happened or why, but I can tell you I don’t go tent camping.
Image source: Chime3, cottonbro studio
#10
I was walking through the woods once with my cousins and we found a very large half-eaten mushroom. A few paces after it was an abandoned pair of pants.
May have been unrelated to each other, but it was weird.
Image source: SarahTheJuneBug
#11
I once escorted a church group, ages young kids through adults, on a weekend overnight outing to a camp in the Poconos. The camp was set at the confluence of two streams and was somewhat rugged. The group had lots to do – a climbing wall, boating, hiking, sports, all kinds of stuff, including a nature center and little museum. The nature center had interactive displays, fish tanks, small animals, etc, and a “touch table” – a large wooden table with sides, on which was scattered all sorts of artifacts the guests could pick up and handle. These items included deer antlers, bones, turtle shells, feathers, arrowheads and pottery, rocks, seeds and nuts, tanned hides, etc. Little kids especially loved it. All of the items were found by guests or staff while out in the camp, and returned to the nature center. I handled the items also, and I noticed one bone had a really odd shape. I am an environmental scientist by profession, and an outdoorsman and naturalist for fun, and can generally recognize what bones came from what parts of what animals. This bone was a HUMAN MANDIBLE – the lower jawbone of a person. It was severely worn smooth and had no teeth, but easily recognizable as such. It had been there for years, handled by thousands of people, and no one noticed or at least reported it. I reported it to the director who removed it and notified the State Police. They investigated it, it seemed very old, and no one was reported missing in the immediate area, so the camp was allowed to keep it. Possible explanation – the facility was the site of a timbering and ice harvesting camp up until the 1920’s, and may have been the remains of a worker who died and was buried right there. But who knows the real story. And as far as I know, it’s still on the table.
Image source: psilome, Bruno Galvão
#12
I went backpacking for 3 days with some friends like January 1st of this year. First night I was there I was sleeping in my 2 person tent with one of my buddies and I started to hear something walking outside of the tent around 4am, I think “it’s probably just some animal there are elk everywhere who knows but I’m safe” I try going back to bed but it sounds like what ever is out there just keeps pacing the tent back and fourth, I turn my head so the back is facing the corner of the tent and it felt like there was something moving it’s face into the tent trying to smell me, I stay very still hoping whatever is there goes away, then all of a sudden it stomps and just misses my head, I remain still and get the feeling of it moving it’s head in again, I quickly elbow it but nothing was there and I heard no more noises after that not even running if I spooked it, I grab my pistol that is in the other corner and wake my buddy up and tell him the situation, I open the tent and look outside, nothing. I still have no clue what that could have been and wished I opened the tent when it was pacing.
Image source: Gostem2, cottonbro studio
#13
After spending so much time in the field and hanging out with other wildlife people, I suspect that there are many things the average person would find very weird but I find normal. At the same time, there are things that the average person might see as normal that are weird as hell to me. Something as simple as seeing Crows and Starlings flocking together unnerves me while for most people they would probably be like “Huh. A bunch of birds.”
The weirdest thing that comes to mind is a bizarre beaver dam I was dealing with yesterday. A beaver had clogged up the control structure for a stormwater pond. That isn’t that weird because they do it all the time. Usually, they just pile up some sticks on the outside then pack a bit of mud into it and call it a day. Not this guy. Instead, he decides to crawl into the drainage pipe with the sticks and build the dam in there. He then stacked up more sticks and mud until he reach the top of the structure. All told there was probably about 5 or 6 feet of concrete pipe that was packed solid. I don’t even know how he managed to do it because even when we just got a trickle of water running through, the current was enough that we were getting worried about being sucked in. Once it was actually clear, it was a powerful torrent that should have swept any beaver away long before they could build anything.
Image source: Crayshack, Derek Otway
#14
Worked at a National Monument in the middle of nowhere Oregon one summer. As in, population of 7000 for the entire county. One night, my friends and I were driving back from a late game night on the highway through the monument. It was around midnight, so absolutely pitch black except for our headlights and literally no one else for miles (monument is day use only). We get to the intersection in the gorge, and all of a sudden see a car stopped, lights off, in the middle of the highway. We got closer and saw a guy slumped over the steering wheel. My friends were talking about getting out to see if he needed help, and I said hell no let’s get out of here.
We drove out of the gorge to where we had service, and called the police. I found out later that it was a DUI and he had his young daughter with him. I am both very glad we did not stop to try and help and glad we called the police. He was in a place where someone coming from the other direction could have easily hit him because it was so dark and the roads are so narrow and windy.
TL:DR – stopped car in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.
Image source: anon, kamran norollahi
#15
One of our properties has an abandoned hunting shack on it. My coworker and I decided to check it out to see if it was creepy, and it wasn’t. No vandalism, due to being on private property deep in the woods, just some hangers and boxes labeled “files’. We left, and made sure to shut the door tight so animals/bugs wouldn’t get in.
We passed the shack the next day in our buggy, and the door was wide open, but the screen door was shut. No one goes on this property and hunting has ceased there.
Image source: A_sweet_boy, Mike González
#16
My dad is a warden at a provincial park in Canada, it’s a wilderness park that mostly just has people’s cabins and other stuff they want to do with LUPs (Land Use Permits) so most of his job is to deal with people not paying/breaking rules on their permitted land. He was told that somebody was living in the park without a permit, so he went to the area (alone) and found “about three dozen” doll heads on sharpened sticks surrounding a small cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney. He knocked on the door but nobody was home so he left a fine for building without an LUP (almost $1000). The next week it was paid for by an old man that came into the office, he said he put the heads up to scare away people. My dad said he seemed a bit off, but mostly harmless; needless to say, he was still super creeped out.
Image source: Motohead1738, Deann DaSilva
#17
1) I interned at a National Wildlife Refuge in the Bay Area, and lived in housing provided on-site. There was a ground squirrel burrow near my window. We also had quite a few foxes in the area. On more than one occasion, in the middle of the night, I was woken up by what sounded like screaming kids. It was creepy AF. And that was how I learned what foxes sound like when they’re raiding a ground squirrel burrow.
2) Trail running in the Seattle area, I had just finished a tough hill and was starting to drop down the other side. I got a good head of steam and was just enjoying letting gravity do the work. All of a sudden, a coyote darted out of the bushes right in front of me. I had too much momentum to stop in time, so I instinctually jumped over it to avoid a collision. I kept running, and he disappeared into the bushes on the other side of the trail. Pretty sure both of us kept running thinking “What?”.
Image source: xfkirsten, Pixabay
#18
I was out climbing in the Rockies around Banff, Canada with some friends. It was a nice, normal day and everyone was just working on their routes. It was a quiet area with only a few routes so it was just the three of us out there. All of a sudden a loud trumpet/ deep air horn kind of noise breaks the silence. It goes off a couple of times.
No idea what it was, never heard it before, never heard it again.
Image source: gawkypanda, Grosjean Benoit
#19
Not something I saw, but rather, something I heard. This past summer, my girlfriend and I thru-hiked the Colorado Trail. One morning, we’re breaking down our camp and the sun had just come up so it was still pretty early in the morning, maybe around 6-6:30 am. We were camped in this long straight valley (in the Lost Creek wilderness, for any fellow CT thru-hikers). As we’re packing up and getting ready to start hiking again, we can hear this crazy screaming sound, over and over again for maybe a couple minutes. It sounded pretty far off but was echoing through the valley. We both sat there and listened to it, trying to figure out what it was. I have spent a lot of time in the Colorado mountains and have never heard this sound before. At first, we thought it may have been a person, but we were at a fairly remote section of the trail. Once we finished, we did some research and we think it may have been a Mountain Lion, as they sometimes will make a similar screaming noise, but who knows! We were both a little nervous to start hiking again after that!
Image source: anon, Arina Krasnikova
#20
I was hiking in the Carpathian mountains and got a chance to talk with the local mountain rangers. A lone hiker had passed the rangers’ cabin wearing sneakers as footwear and without gloves. It being winter, the rangers had told the guy that he’s not properly equipped and should probably turn back, but without effect. Once it had been dark for a few hours and there was no sign of the hiker returning, they headed out for rescue.
The guy was luckily found alive. He was lying bleeding in a pit in the snow with bloodstains all over himself and the surroundings. It turned out he had read that cutting your hands will keep you warm and prevent your fingers getting frostbitten. Maybe this guy got his mountain survival tips from the same source antivaxxers get their medical advice?
Image source: gagar1n01, Daniel Frese
#21
Not my own personal story, but it’s my brother’s. He interned for the forestry department one summer after college. He was setup in a cabin in a remote part of some state Park and alone all summer. After his internship ended he came home and we all had a nice family dinner to welcome him back. We all were excited to hear about living in the sold and what it was like. He told us about the serenity of nature and how loud yet quite it was at the same time. Someone, not sure who, asked what the creepiest thing was. He looked at is all with this look of pure confusion and fear. Almost like if you saw Bigfoot? He went on to tell us about this strange creature that loved under his front porch. He kept saying it was the strangest thing ever. It was like a cat that barked like a dog and it would bars at him every night. He swore up and down that it was something out of an old native American myth and had to be supernatural because, of course, cats can’t bark. We were all very curious and asked him to describe it. He said it was red, the size of a small dog, and had this big fuzzy tail. My other brother held up his phone and asked him if this was the strange creature he saw. He explained yes with the most amount of pure shock I’ve ever seen. It was a fox, my 24 year old brother who wanted to work as a forest ranger had, apparently, never seen a fox before. Needless to say he didn’t get a job offer.
Image source: Mr-teddy-rumplstilsk, Alex Andrews
#22
Hiked past a full wicker living room set (coffee table, sofa, arm chair) out in the middle of nowhere in the desert miles from any form of civilization. I was bummed that it was still early into my hike because it would have been a great lunch spot.
Image source: LukeDemeo, Fanusta Global
#23
Ranger/guide in Greater Kruger Area here.
A while ago I was guiding student groups on a farm in Balule reserve. We stayed in an old farm house, some rooms were turned into dorm rooms. One day a staff member went to fetch some sand from a dry riverbed nearby (he needed to make some cement). He came back saying he saw “tracks of an animal that he’d never seen”. He had some of his colleagues have a look. They all said the same thing. So by now I’m intrigued and I go down to the riverbed to have a look. Sure enough; there they are. Like a buffalo, but not exactly the round shape you’d expect. Seemed like two pairs of buffalo tracks.
Then I saw it; that’s not two pairs. It’s four pairs …of an animal walking upright! Goosebumps all over. Hair on my neck standing straight up. I called the warden. He came with his new sniffer dog.
That dog went to work, but it was obvious those “strange animals” knew we were on them. Out the reserve, over the railway line, back in the reserve, then again onto another farm, all the way to the horse stables at the edge of Hoedspruit town. That”‘s where we caught the last one; hiding in the stables. But there were four in total. The one we got first broke a leg when jumping over the fence of the reserve. Two others try to hide under the railway line.
Later we also found the rifle, which they had thrown away while running; a .308 with a silencer. We also found bullets and a panga. Now we could charge them with something else than trespassing.
They didn’t make a victim, that time. But they are successful regularly. All our anti-poaching efforts are like mopping with a running tap. I think our rhino are on the way out. We try to fight the symptoms, but cannot fight the cause. And no one seems to care on the whole planet; for just a few species (lion, rhino, elephant, pangolin) no one puts political pressure on any country in the far east.
Image source: TheAfricaBug, Sefa Tekin
#24
I’m a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service. A few times, I’ve been out on my own searching with a canine, and they’ve tried to lead me straight up cliffs. Not hills, not even rock faces. Straight, sheer cliffs with no possible handholds. It’s always baffling, and in those cases we usually find the person on the other side of the cliff, or miles away from where the canine has led us. I’m sure there’s an explanation, but it’s sort of strange.
Image source: searchandrescuewoods, Nina Quka
#25
Our volunteer fire department was called out to assist in a search for a missing man. When we arrived on-scene, we were informed that he was a convict, out on work-release, and hadn’t returned to the prison.
They found his car on a backwoods road, near a gas pipeline trail. He went missing on Wednesday, it was now Saturday.
We split into 2-person teams and headed into the woods. We figured we would wander around for a few hours, not find anything, then go home- someone came and picked the guy up, and he was long gone.
About 20 minutes in, our captain calls in on the radio.
“Found him. Subject deceased.”
We came up over the rise, and the guy was standing there, facing away from us. He looked like he was taking a leak.
He had walked about 1/2 mile back in on the gas line, tied a rope to a small tree, and hanged himself. The tree bent over so he was standing up. He asphyxiated instead of breaking his neck.
He stood there for 3 days.
Image source: Phantom_Scarecrow, Lalu Fatoni
#26
I used to work at one of the big desert national parks out in the southwest US where a lot of mysterious stuff could happen in the middle of nowhere. One of my jobs was doing bat surveys, so my team would hike out to remote canyons and find caves and count/identify any bats we found inside. One one trip we were in a remote canyon, and found a cave half way up a cliff face. We carefully scrambled up there, and once we got deeper inside the cave, we found a tent. It looked like a stereotypical hobo camp: the tent was one of those family car camping tents, with a heavy tarp bottom, not a light backpacking tent. It was rundown and partially collapsed, and looked like it had been trampled, and it was surrounded by black plastic trashbags, food that had been chewed by mice, ratty old clothing, and used toilet paper. And it was way inside a cave, a 3+ hour drive from the nearest tiny town, and a 3 hour hike from the ‘trailhead’ (I use the term loosely, cause we weren’t even on a real trail). It looked like it had been there a while.
My optimistic hope is that an unprepared hiker tried to do a hike that was out of their league. It was way hotter than they expected, so they camped in a cave to stay cool, and the long, nearly vertical hike back out of the canyon was too much so they ditched their tent and trash and food so they wouldn’t have as much to carry out.
But on the other hand, this is a huge park with literally thousands of miles of backcountry that gets almost no visitation. In the year I worked there, 10 people (that I know of) perished in the park, and less than a month after this trip someone passed away of heat stroke in the same canyon. People go missing regularly, and are often never found. A lot of people try to hike across parts of the park, and hitch hike and get dropped off instead of leaving a car they have to hike back to. Once they’re in the park, a lot of people set up basecamps, then take daypacks to explore even more remote side canyons, where they can easily get hurt or in trouble without anyone knowing where they are. Whoever left their tent and food behind must have been in really desperate shape or got hurt without help, and easily could have died out with ever being found.
Image source: CompetentFatBody, Simon Migaj
#27
Stairs in the middle of the forest, way off trails, that lead to nowhere.
Image source: TheMurv, DayTrippin2112
#28
I’m not a park ranger but I did have to get rescued by them last week!
We waited in the woods for them to find us for about 3 hours just after sunset. Intermittently, we kept hearing this creepy wailing noise in the distance, but not far enough away for comfort. My best guess is that it was cars driving over a bridge in the road just across the creek we were trapped on the wrong side of.
So it wasn’t anything dangerous, but it was kind of unsettling until we were able to figure out what it was.
Image source: InsOmNomNomnia, dogadakisakal
#29
My aunt and uncle once found a person frozen solid on Gasherbrum II.
Image source: treflexasaurus, Pixabay
#30
I’m Australian.
I once encountered an osprey and a fox engaged in a mexican standoff over a fish the osprey had plucked from a river and dropped, and had landed to retrieve. It was still flopping about. Very surreal. They didn’t fight; the fox snatched it after about 20 seconds and fled.
Image source: mudlarker84, Lorenzo Manera
#31
Hiker, but I saw this in my backyard, in the bushes beside my deck
Inspecting a couple spiderwebs and looking where they may be, I spot one right in the middle of its web.
I settle in with my beer and notice a wasp-looking thing head for the first web I noticed. I thought it would fly in and get trapped, but it seemed to notice it and inspected it.
Then the Waspy-Thing landed where an anchor point was on the leaf. And sniffed around. Took off flying and looked around before discovering the second web, which it did the same to, with the same success.
Then it flew to the third web with the spider in the middle and the spider just dropped! No web to defend from, it just let go of the web when the Waspy-Thing approached!
It hit the edge of my table and deflected to the ground where it balled up, for defence. The Waspy-Thing went to the table and sniffed around a bit before descending to the floor in search of the spider.
I looked for it and couldn’t find it. The spider-ball was gone. The Wasp-y Thing searched for it, sniffing with it’s antennae, and myself searching with my eyes. But it was gone. One more spider escaped from the Waspy-Thing Gang
The weird thing is the spider *KNEW*.
Image source: canehdian78, David J. Boozer
#32
I’ve told this story before but didn’t really get an explanation.
My husband and I were hiking in jasper park, Canada. We were talking and passing other hikers every 15-20 minutes or so. We got to a part of the trail that reaches the peak, and then slowly starts to move down the side of a foothill and the trail is on the side of a slope.
We hadn’t seen anyone in maybe 30 minutes. All of a sudden the entire earth started to shake and there was a thunderous noise. We both squat down together and looked frantically around, trying to find the source of the noise but we saw nothing and heard nothing like branches breaking. I thought for sure it was an elk or something, but if there was an animal, it would have been on the trail either ahead of us or behind us.
We started to make loud noises and I started cracking two rocks together. We kept doing this until we saw another couple hikers about 15 minutes later. We asked if they heard or felt anything and they said no, so we warned them that there may be an animal on the trail ahead.
It would be nice to know what it was.
Image source: seeseecinnamon, MART PRODUCTION
#33
I live next to a national park. As in, you go to my back fence, hop over it, and you’re in the park. It’s a pretty well travelled one, I usually feel perfectly at ease in there because I’m in Australia, so worst I have to worry about is snakes. No bears, no mountain lions, and we’re old hat at dealing with spiders so they’re no big deal.
One night I was asleep at home, in bed, when I heard something large sniffing under my window. It was crunching around in there, grunting loudly. I have never heard anything like it before or since.
All I can think is maybe it’s a wombat, but we don’t get them around here… not a clue.
Image source: Echospite, Moritz Feldmann
#34
As a kid, my parents took my brother and I camping in an Apache pop-up trailer. One trip, we went to Yellowstone National Park.
Per the warnings, we took our ice chest into the trailer each night.
. . .
One night, I heard something scrape the door. Didn’t think anything of it…
The next morning we got up to see a bunch of people looking at our door. Came outside to find three six-inch-long black marks that were most likely a bear; luckily the creature did not puncture the door’s flimsy metal.
Image source: anon, Photo Collections
#35
Hiking way off trail in the Tetons, stopped for a breather and then heard the sounds of something big walking through the fallen leaves: CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH. Like, clearly footfalls. Sounded like something heavy, elk or grizzly size – I could hear branches snapping when it stepped on fallen branches. But the thing was, I couldn’t see it! There was nothing moving anywhere around me and I had a pretty good line of sight all around.
I just sat very still looking all around while it went CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH, until finally it walked away. It was totally like there was an invisible (but very audible, lol) ghost walking around me.
All I could think afterwards was that maybe there was a little gully close by that I hadn’t seen, and it was walking in the gully. There were a lot of fallen trees and though it looked like mostly level ground, the Tetons generally do have gullies & depressions. Maybe a couple of tree logs were hiding a gully, idk.
I still tell people about the “invisible elk” that I met, lol.
Image source: NorthernSparrow, Mădălina Vlăduță
#36
My brother is a national park ranger. He only had one weird experience in Big Bend National Park. He and his roommate had the exact same dream where chased through the mountains by a large black bull. Turns out the canyon he was staying in is haunted by a witch that takes the form of a bull. It’s called Brujas Canyon or something, Google it I guess.
He says a lot of weird things happen in the Southwest though, and his fellow rangers who have worked in the NPS for a while have some good stories. One season he was working at Arches in Utah, and his friend/fellow ranger had taken a kayaking trip somewhere in that area of Utah. One night while sleeping by the banks of the river, she had a very vivid dream of something walking in the water outside her tent. She went outside to check and there was a naked woman in the river. This woman then jumped on his friend, and started choking her so violently that when she woke up she was still seriously gasping for breath. The next morning she checked outside her tent and there were cougar tracks everywhere.
She talked to a Native friend about this, and turns out skinwalkers will turn into cougars and hang out in that section of the river. Apparently she’s lucky to be alive. My brother said the fear of skinwalkers is so alive in those Native communities that when he would visit schools to give talks he would have to refrain from talking about certain animals because they’re commonly associated with skinwalkers. Owls and cougars apparently.
He also said there’s quite a few NPS rangers that believe in Bigfoot. Not that he’s a real ape but some kind of forest spirit.
Edit: Replied to another commenter below with my brother’s Bigfoot story.
Image source: MorelsandRamps, Getty Images
#37
I worked at a national park for about 4months when I really needed money. It’s a big group of lakes and a few caves (I’m gonna describe it like that since I’m not okay with saying the real location) , 2 months in and another cave entrance was discovered.i don’t mean a big cave but a small water cave. Knee deep. When I hear about it I went to go check it out beafor with got its own little path to it and all that. It was pretty boring but the next day a few workers came to ad a path to the location. They discovered a body of a man in his 40s. He fell from a cliff that is a popular photo area, was probably alone on the trip. Nobody noticed , I didn’t see any of it but I heard that he completely decomposed and and there where just bones.
Image source: ivan_jesen, Stefan Stefancik
#38
I’m a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service. I have a pretty good track record for finding missing people. Most of the time they just wander off the path, or slip down a small cliff, and they can’t find their way back. The majority of them have heard the old ‘stay where you are’ thing, and they don’t wander far. But I’ve had two cases where that didn’t happen. Both bother me a lot, and I use them as motivation to search even harder on the missing persons cases I get called on. The first was a little boy who was out berry-picking with his parents. He and his sister were together, and both of them went missing around the same time. Their parents lost sight of them for a few seconds, and in that time both the kids apparently wandered off. When their parents couldn’t find them, they called us, and we came out to search the area. We found the daughter pretty quickly, and when we asked where her brother was, she told us that he’d been taken away by ‘the bear man.’ She said he gave her berries and told her to stay quiet, that he wanted to play with her brother for a while. The last she saw of her brother, he was riding on the shoulders of ‘the bear man’ and seemed calm. Of course, our first thought was abduction, but we never found a trace of another human being in that area. The little girl was also insistent that he wasn’t a normal man, but that he was tall and covered in hair, ‘like a bear’, and that he had a ‘weird face.’ We searched that area for weeks, it was one of the longest calls I’ve ever been on, but we never found a single trace of that kid. The other was a young woman who was out hiking with her mom and grandpa. According to the mother, her daughter had climbed up a tree to get a better view of the forest, and she’d never come back down. They waited at the base of the tree for hours, calling her name, before they called for help. Again, we searched everywhere, and we never found a trace of her. I have no idea where she could possibly have gone, because neither her mother or grandpa saw her come down.
Image source: searchandrescuewoods, jonas mohamadi
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