4. Hundreds and hundreds of rats.
“I was camping in the Florida Keys one winter. I managed to survive the large snakes and even larger alligators as well as the scorpions which would get in my shoes at night but one experience I will never forget. My campsite was next to an old rock quarry which had filled with water and made a good place for swimming and getting water from. There was also an old dump sight close to this quarry with piles of stoves and fridges and other junk. It had been there for a while but nothing new had been added to it for a long time. One day a fellow shows up and tells me that they were going to clean up the dump and burn some of the junk so I better move my tent. So I gathered up all of my belongings and moved a few hundred yards back into the woods.
That day they started burning the garbage and I thought nothing about it until I climbed into my tent at night. As soon as it got dark and I was falling asleep my tent became covered with hundreds of rats. I guess they had moved out of the dump because of the fire and we’re just wondering around looking for food. They were everywhere climbing up my ropes and over the top of the tent. I shook as many as I could off and started a fire and stayed up all night hoping they wouldn’t return. They seemed to be gone so the next night I stayed in the same place thinking they had moved on to another dump or something but no, again as it got dark they all returned bringing some of their friends as it seemed there was more than ever now. I again shook them off the tent and got a fire going. When the morning came I packed up my tent and headed for a new place far from those rats. As I was walking down the highway wondering if I should return to another camping spot where I had been previously, there on the highway near to that place was a dead 11-foot alligator which had crawled out from the mangroves only a few feet from where I had been camping a few weeks previously. I decided my Florida camping adventure had gone on long enough and headed back home.”
5. The hundred-year-old crime scene.
“When I was young (from age 5-11) my dad lived in an old log cabin about 15 miles west of Sheridan, WY in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. Every summer when I was visiting we would go up into the mountains backpacking and fishing for two days every weekend. We would park the truck, hike into a remote area fishing for trout along the way and make camp wherever we ended up. We encountered a number of strange/creepy things and got into some scary situations with wildlife, but the one that sticks with me the most was an ancient abandoned camp we found.
We were hiking down a very steep slope to get to an area of a creek that had been dammed up by beavers, hoping to catch some big trout. I had climbed out on a rock ledge and was looking for a way down when I saw the stock and action of an old rusty rifle sticking out of a tree (where the tree had grown around the barrel years before) about 10′ above the ground. Dad and I climbed down to check it out and we found a small cave at the base of the rock formation, only about 12′ deep, which would make a nice natural shelter but a really terrible place to set up a long term camp. Inside we found a bunch of really old stuff; three heavy gauge unopened cans of food, an old cast iron pot that had holes rusted all the way through it, a crusty old saddle and bridle set, and a very deteriorated heavy wool blanket rolled up and tied with a leather belt.
When we unwrapped the blanket we found several personal items including a rusty old cap and ball black powder revolver, a leather satchel with lead pistol shot, a powder horn with no black powder in it, tarnished old cartridges (presumably for the rifle in the tree), a straight razor, and most unsettling was a shirt with holes in it and over half of it stained with dried blood. As we stood there thinking about what all of this meant it occurred to me how remote this place was even at that time (it was July of 1985) and the fact that whoever owned that shirt had been very seriously injured, stuck on a steep slope in the middle of absolutely no where I got serious chills down my spine. The only thing that somewhat dated this fateful campsite was the pistol and the rifle, both of which were made sometime in the 1870’s according to my father. There’s no way to ever know what happened to the man who owned all this stuff but the fact that he or someone he knew was obviously shot twice with either a gun or arrows and all his belongings were sitting right where he left them possibly 100 years later, it was highly unlikely he left that area alive. Discovering what amounts to a 100-year-old crime scene in the very remote wilderness kinda gave me the creeps. But mostly, it just made me sad to know how hopeless and alone this guy must have felt when he died.”
