“I was hiking in the mountains in Missoula, Mt. and came across a cage. Not like a trapping cage or anything but something that could easily hold 5-10 average sized people. Took maybe 45 minutes of walking, mostly uphill and without a path, to get to the spot. Round steel bars for the edges and rope instead of chain link for the walls and ceiling. It was all set up just on the far side of the ridgeline I was walking so it couldn’t be seen I suppose. Nothing around it, no footprints or tire tracks or anything. The rope looked undamaged as well. No idea what it was for but it definitely creeped me the fuck out.”

“My dad and I were out camping in the Mountains. We had set up our tents and then we heard screams in the woods. We packed up our stuff and drove to a different part. We thought it was mountains folks eating people or something. We drive down by the store and told the clerk that we heard screams. Turns out it was an orgy for people who dress up in animal costumes. He was telling us that they have been doing this for years.”

“I was out fossil hunting in a wash after a thunderstorm the night before. I figured it had to uncover a bit of stuff down in the streambed.”

“I found an old Super 8 camera up on Springer Mountain in Georgia. My mom had an old projector so we played the film and it turned out to be a couple having sex in an anthill.”

“My buddies and I found a cooler in a gully while camping. It was dark and we left it, but authorities found it a few weeks later and there was a body in it. So that’s cool.”

“Went on a 5-day gold panning trip with a couple buddies of mine. We drove 6 hours down unused logging roads, we’re talking totally overgrown roads with trees having to be removed from the road to pass. We saw not one human the entire time we were out there, except for on the 3rd night… at 3am. We are sitting around the fire, drinking some beers, swatting at bugs, and shooting the shit when I hear something. I look over and notice some light in the trees. What the… It’s a truck, driving up the logging road we had cleared ourselves to get there, at 3am. The truck gets up to where we are, pulls into where we made camp (a small turn off spot for logging trucks), sits there for 10sec while we all kinda stare in shock at one another, I get up and start walking towards the truck to say hello and ask what the heck they are doing out at 3am on abandoned logging roads when the truck just backs up, turns around, and drives off the way it came… The guy(s) just drove 6 hours down logging roads all through the night, sees us and leaves without saying a word… We are all sitting there going, “uhhh what the fuck?” We all figured this guy was driving down the road, getting out and coming back to kill us in our sleep. Next morning we head down the road and nothing, they didn’t set up camp or anything… Just left. We figured we were likely camped out near a grow-op for one of the gangs (Hells Angels most likely) and they were coming out to check who had come out to their spot, or they were there to pick the crop in the middle of the night.”

“When out exploring an old abandoned quarry with some friends we found this dude stood staring at this rock, occasionally twitching, but he never turned around. We were pretty creeped out so didn’t investigate, and left pretty soon after. Later on that night we found out that another friend was driving down the lane that runs parallel to the quarry found a guy in a black coat stood in the middle of the road, and wouldn’t move. She was pretty freaked out and had to reverse all the way back up the lane in the dark because he was still there. Pretty sure it was the same guy, otherwise it was just a big coincidence.”

“Hiking alone at dusk doing a five-mile loop in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles. I see another lone hiker approaching from the opposite direction. As he gets closer, I suddenly realize I know this person: It’s the guy who played Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. We get within three feet of each other. He looks at me. He sees the lightning bolt of recognition hit my face. His sad and resigned expression back said it all: “Yes, I’m him. No, I’m not really a serial killer.” I walked briskly by him anyway and didn’t look back until I was a good 100 yards down the trail.”

“When I was 19, I spent a lot of time wandering the west coast. I was a pretty naive girl. I decided to backpack the Lost Coast (close to Eureka, CA) and as I was driving the long single lane dirt road to get to the starting point, I noticed a completely out of place Escalade tailgating me hard. I finally pulled over and let them pass. Not long after, I get to what looks like a tiny little grocery store. The only other car is the Escalade. I head inside and see four huge guys talking to the shop owner behind the counter. These guys were enormous, all four were easily around 6’4-6’6 and three of them looked like pure iron. The leader had the longest dreads I had ever seen. They immediately stopped talking and looked at me. They were not smiling, and the dreadlock fellow had scars all over his face. I turned around and walked out, headed down to the coast and did my backpacking thing. When I finished, I hitched a few rides back to my car. The different locals who picked me told me stories about the massive amounts of marijuana being grown in the area and the patrols used to secure the crops. They thoroughly warned me not to camp in the area and to NEVER leave the road. “People die out here” they said.”

“I was backpacking in Yellowstone above the tree line at about 10,500 feet. We are hiking on a ridge above a lake when all the sudden we come across a horse skull. No body just the skull, pretty cool looking. We get to our campsite not to far away from the lake near where we found the horse skull. When we get climb down to the lake we find the body of the horse rotting on the edge of the lake with with negative film strips floating in the water and laying around the shore near the body.”

“I was backpacking in New Hampshire and camped out for the night after a day hike. I wondered off from our fire to go take a piss and stumbled upon a circle etched into the ground with tuning forks surrounding the circle standing up straight…It looked like a creepy ritual circle and it bugged me out so I booked it back to the group.”

“I don’t have a picture, but last year I hiked part of the Appalachian trail in Tennessee when I came across a noose just hanging from one of the trees. Nothing was hanging from it, it was just there.”

“Came across a rundown town (really, really small) out in northern New Mexico that seemed to have one person living in it. We based that on the fact that there was still some food and supplies there that were fairly fresh (perhaps just a few days old). Spent a couple days there trying to find the person, just to find out why they were staying in the town. Never found a person.”

“This old woman hiker in her 70s some how saw us in reverse order through a wormhole or something. The first time we saw her she said “oh, well hello again!” I just passed it off as her being old, slightly senile. Then 30 minutes later, we saw her again and this time she just said “hi” as she passed us. I’m not even sure how she got there…she was going the opposite direction of us on the trail both times. TL:DR – timey-wimey, wibbely-wobbly”

“Me and my brother were hiking out in our new backwoods (we had just moved into a new house) and we stumbled upon a small open grass field. In the center of it, there was a person with a blue jacket crouched over. We thought it was a friend of ours that we had recently met, so I ran out to meet. I did not have my glasses on, but I got pretty close enough to see that it was a grown man leaned over the carcass of a deer, stabbing it with an unsharpened stick. He looked up, and saw me. I was pretty freaked out, so I turned around and yelled at my brother to run, and so we started to sprint as fast as we could back home.”

“I was hiking in the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington back in ’03. I was trying to do this really snazzy hike from the Ocean to Mt. Olympus. Fog as thick as anything you can imagine. Day goes by, and fog isn’t clearing up at all. I get to a fairly big clearing and set up my tent. I grab a power bar and chill out as it starts going to the darkest black night I’ve ever experienced. I’m seriously a bit unnerved at the whole thing…not scared as much as just…anxious. About 2 in the morning, I start hearing this huffing noise. Like Darth Vader without the helmet on. My imagination starts to go freaky, and I reach for my flashlight. I pull the drawstring on the tent a little…very quietly…and poke my head out. Still dark as death. I hear the noise coming from maybe, MAYBE five feet to my right. At this point, I’m seriously re-thinking my belief in Sasquatch. I poke my flashlight out and turn it on. I’m a few feet away from a MASSIVE Roosevelt Elk, who’d lost his way in the dark as well. He sees the flashlight, bolts the other way, tags a tree and knocks himself clean out. I laid in the tent until I heard a groan, a bunch of commotion and the big guy grunt away.”

“Bushwalking in NSW (Australia) me and my friend came across this weird platform looking thing made out of rocks. Later that year the cops arrested some bloke on suspicion of the murders of a series of backpackers who had gone missing over the course of a few years, and at the sites of several of the murders slightly off in the bush were these ‘altars’. Current affairs show runs footage of one (the trial and run up to it were all over the news) and yeah it’s that thing we found. The ‘altars’ were typically no more than 300 yards from the victim’s shallow graves. The guy who was arrested and subsequently convicted for the murders is Ivan Milat, Australia’s worst serial killer. Nb the cops are pretty sure that at least one other person was involved in the murders than the one now in jail for the crime, they just couldn’t prove it.”

“We found a dummy hanging from a tree while in the Yukon territory of Canada. Literally out in the middle of the woods. No reason for it, as far as we know.”

“Meth Heads that we ran into on the trail, they threatened us with a knife and asked for money. My friends 357 that we had for bears came in handy.”

“Took my young children to a cave not far from the house. Popular spot, but we had the place to ourselves. You can walk through it in about 30 minutes without too much difficulty. It has a tiny exit at the opposite end. It was pretty muddy, so we decided to turn around and head back to the entrance. Halfway back, there was a lit candle sitting about eight feet up one side. It was definitely not there on the first trip. I went into full-on protective-dad-mode knowing there was likely someone hiding in the dark while we walked the rest of the way out.”

“The words “Per audacia ad ignotum” drawn in the snow in the absolute middle of nowhere, yet no footprints around them. The words were probably a few hours old. The closest translation we could find was “through audacity towards the unknown.”

“I was once on a canoeing trip in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. We started walking up the coast of the lake about 200 feet from our camp looking for a good fishing spot. What we actually found was another campsite. However, it was ABSOLUTELY wrecked. Trash strewn everywhere, tent collapsed and torn, clothes on the ground. At first, we were just like disgusted like what assholes did this? or left their shit out to be bear food? The more we looked around though, the weirder things seemed though. For one, their garbage was still hoisted into a tree to keep it safe from bears, but the whole bag was ripped open despite being 30 feet in the air. Second, literally everything except the canoes were still at the campsite. Clothes, packs, food, rope, pans, like a serious set of hiking equipment. Enough for 2 or 3 people. Half of it was trashed and torn open, mostly the packs, tent, and clothes. The other half was totally untouched but thrown on the ground. Like somebody NOPE’d the hell out of there in nothing but their long johns ditching hundreds of dollars of gear in the process. We waited a couple hours and eventually called it back to our helicopter crew– but they hadn’t been aware of anybody else or gotten any distress calls. We eventually just left everything and moved camp.”

“I lived in a national park by myself for three months. Several times when I was going back to my trailer for the day, I would hear music like a music box or an ice cream truck. It was always loud and sounded like it was coming from somewhere over my head. One day I decided to look for the source so I followed the dirt road past my trailer. The music continued, I couldn’t tell if I was getting closer or not. I had my eyes on the trees and looked down just in time to avoid stepping on a snake. I scrambled back but it didn’t move. I realized it was dead and it wasn’t alone, there were half a dozen dead copperheads stretched out in the road, looking in the same direction. I went back to get my car because I couldn’t bring myself to step over them, but by the time I got my keys, the music had stopped and I didn’t hear it again.”