That fog does crazy things to you

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.

Well, day 1 is a blast, get everything accomplished.

Day 2, fog. Fog as thick as anything you can imagine. I can’t get a decent GPS fix, so I’m pretty much blind, but I know if I follow the Hoh river upstream, I’ll get to one of the campsites I’m going for. 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.

 Ah, that’s really creepy

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.