Horror In The Woods: 24 SUPER-Creepy Real-Life Stories Of Camping Gone Wrong
"I see an old dude with a van...That man's name was Gary Michael Hilton, convicted of at least four murders...."
21. A black bear right outside my tent.
“When I was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, at one point in NY I was trying to catch up to some friends by doing big miles, so I ended up night hiking and camping in a pine forest between shelters a few hundred yards off the trail for privacy. After I got my tent all set up I realized there were basically no good tree branches to hang my food bag from — Wandered around for 15 minutes at a close radius to my tent trying to find something with no luck because of the type of trees and branch strength. But I knew there was a chance of bears because it was close to some parks, where people are always leaving food out. Eventually I find a tree just 15 feet from my tent that has one branch that’ll do. As soon as I get my food bag up I crash hard and start having nightmares about being chased by a banshee. I don’t get nightmares often but this was a vivid one. There were very distinctive sound as this she-demon makes repeated swoops for me out of the sky. I eventually wake up in a full sweat, glad to realize it was just a dream.
AND THEN I HEAR THE SOUND DIRECTLY OUTSIDE OF MY TENT AT MAX VOLUME. Holy fuck was I scared. It started happening at semi-regular intervals, and became clear it was nearby but not actively directly towards my tent. Eventually I peeped out from under my vestibule towards my food bag and sure enough there was a big burly black bear jumping up towards the bag that was hanging about 12 feet off the ground. He was almost getting to it, but the noise was his exertion of grunting as he leaped up to swipe at it.
Eventually the bear left, but for about two hours I was clutching my knife and trekking pole for defense and had my headlamp ready in case the bear came over my way. Fortunately he did not, but that nightmare->reality transition was one of the scariest moments of my entire life.”
22. Camped inside a leopard’s lair…then the leopard returned.
“So I was in Zimbabwe on a hike with 2 adults and about 12 teenagers, we were not following a path and just using a map on a three-day trip to these waterfalls (car was there to pick us up). We come to a dam with a 20-30m area of beach sand, this is very unnatural and caused a lot of discussion. Where the beach stopped there were granite boulders and large rocks, it was very attractive and we decided to set up camp early. 1 hour later someone finds this cave, the mouth was small and we had to go down on all fours to get in, but once inside, wow…. 3m high ceiling and 10m long it was amazing. There was a crack in the ceiling allowing a beam of light to come streaming though. Naturally, the majority of us wanted to sleep in there. 1am I wake up being shaken and the Leader of the hike is telling everyone to get out as there is a Leopard outside and this is his lair (they often chose caves to reside in). I’m not too phased as this guy is always scheming up pranks and jokes, so I rollover and pretend to sleep. Next thing I know my sleeping bag is pulled off of me and I’m being “ordered” to get now or I’m responsible for myself. I then realized he was not kidding, and scurried out, lol. We all then sat as close as we could to the fire was we watches the eyes of the leopard pacing up and down in the dark less than a stone’s throw away but has the water to our backs so we where stuck. Fortunately the leopard did not like the activity and moved off, however they hunt at night and we are pretty much sitting ducks, so I didn’t sleep much that night. Every sound was a threat and every moving bush was one step closer to the end of my life. Looking at the tracks the next morning that circled the campsite,… we were pretty freaking lucky.
TL;DR Pretty much set up camp in a leopard’s cave and where stuck between a dam and the leopard when he came back.”
