Scary Stories

Have you ever heard a whitetail doe scream? I had to look it up for myself.
The dog and I were in the garage working on the Jeep one night after my wife and kids left for the night. I was wrenching and having a couple beers. I went outside to take a leak and heard what sounded like a high pitched weeze or exhale, almost like a woman screaming. The dog heard it too. I blew it off, fox or bird or something right? Sometime passed and nature called again so went outside. This time I heard the same sound in a total opposite direction. The dog growled. It was getting late so I put the tools awaI, shutdown the garage and went in the house. As I was shutting off lights, I could hear the screaming again. Loud enough to hear inside. It basically sounded like if exhaled violently through your mouth. I went to bed that night thankful that my wife and kids didn't hear it because I'd never hear the end of it 😆. I laid there trying to make sense of it. The next morning I talked to my neighbor and he said he had a bear on his deck. This was June and I had just seen a new fawn with a doe the day before. So I googled strange deer noises and bingo. I guess it's a noise to attract a threat to the doe and keep it from the fawn.

haha yes that's a good one too, I forgot about that particularly unsettling sound they can make...I recall now the first time I heard that it had me a touch disturbed for sure, couldn't believe it was a deer when someone explained that to me.
 
I grew up and hunted on a disused farm near Mid-coast Maine. At the time, in the 90's, the line was that lions, wolverines, wolves, lynx, didn't exist so don't bother asking or reporting about them. We did have coyotes, bobcat, bear, all manner of large predatory bird, and moose that were all anecdotally said to occasionally bother hunters. All of the verboten creatures listed above had been seen, but never by someone you knew within 3 degrees. Most have since been confirmed by the state or people I trust, including lions by two different sisters at different times in the town this farm was located. Just by people I know myself wolves, lions and wolverine have been seen within 8 miles of the house. God knows what else has crept back down the river valleys over the last century.

That said, two things come to mind as having spooked me personally, and maybe they can be attributed to one of these animals. But maybe not, and I don't like it.

1. I was sitting a 30-year-abandoned skidder trail with my much older and experienced cousin. It was a really still, cold day near thanksgiving. Absolutely no air moving, the kind where you hold your breath involuntarily because you can hear your skin move in your shirt, let alone any creature moving within half a mile. So we're about 40 yard apart, back to back so to speak. Absolutely nothing happening, the woods are dead as a smelt. Then we get the lightest shift of air for one second, westerly, coming from the swampy lake, across us, and into the thicket just to the south of us. It dies. Nothing to care about. Then a few moments later form my cousin's direction a voice started, mid range and not loud, like a smallish lady talking in the wind. In one breath it went smoothly from that to HIGH and LOUD like an old fashioned siren but faster. It crescendoed to its peak and slammed instantly back to silence. I thought "creepy but he'll know what that was" and leaned forward to see my cousin. He was still, studying the woods in front of him, waiting for more. After way too long he leaned around and whispered "WHAT THE ---- WAS THAT!?" Not another shred of noise came from that direction, and we could easily triangulate where we thought it came from. Too close, as close to both of us as we were to each other. Nothing I could ever picture having made the noise made sense. It was very likely a bird but it had to have been an enormous bird. It was sonorous and not raspy or screechy like any owl or eagle or hawk or raccoon I've ever heard. But it was clearer and louder than a human or deer or coyote could ever manage. I've never been able to find a recording that was anything like it. I've heard foxes crying, fisher cats, raccoons fighting, I've heard rabbits screaming when killed, I've heard recordings of lions in heat. I was never able to confidently walk through that spot alone again. Whatever it was was yelling at us and not talking to its family, and it never made a sound moving around. There was one trail where we had to low crawl though a hollow old evergreen thicket about 50 yards from where the noise occurred and I couldn't ever duck in there again without worrying about whatever made that noise.

2. About a half mile of trail from the first event and a year later I found a pile of poop. I was with my uncle, an extremely experienced woods hunter. I thought it was odd because a) it was mostly apples and there aren't any red apples within 400 yards, so whatever it was either started within 400 feet of the house or came to our property from close to the neighbors house. b) it was HUGE. I just knew it wasnt deer scat so I pointed it out as coyote because why not. My uncle cocked his head and focused on it, which he never did to anything I mentioned. He's always moving his eyes and attention around because he's a good hunter. But he locked onto it and said no... wait, that kinda looks like a bear... what?... I don't think it's a bear, but... that looks friggin human... sort of. If it's a bear he feels a lot better and he's big. I dunno... Then he moved on without concluding with his shoulders or a joke which never happens.

Maybe there was nothing special about that turd but he never misses an opportunity to jerk my chain. And the scream might not have been unique, bloodcurdling as it was. Each are freaky on their own but forgettable seperately. They gained new life when I was researching bigfoot and heard someone's recording of what they thought was a squatch in their woods. I hadn't thought of the turd or the scream in a decade but that recording was the CLOSEST BY FAR to what I heard with my cousin. I'm not saying it was an apple-loving Maine bigfoot, but now I have to live with that question in my mind.
That was a good one. That part with the scream/ strange sound was pretty creepy.
 
This is embarrassingly stupid and not so much creepy as just remembering a really scary heavy sinking feeling when I was probably 16 or so. I grew up on a farm but always tell people I was the worst farm kid ever, not mechanically inclined at all but more relevant to our story no inherent sense of direction whatsoever. No drama, nothing more to the story than this: I got REALLY turned around in the bush after shooting light/sundown and, in a rare but not at all unheard of turn of events there wasn't snow on the ground yet (deer season in Saskatchewan usually being November and the first half of December) so normally it would be as simple as following my own tracks in the snow, but there's no snow and the grounds frozen so your boots aren't making any real tracks and it's full dark out and the temperature at night is getting well
below -20c. Those of you who live in places that get harsh winter in any capacity will know what I mean when I say that -20 feels much more brutal when there's no snow on the ground than once the snow is deep, I don't know why but it's the way it is. Anyway, just the grossest most horrible dread feeling ever, few things worse than feeling truly lost, at any age I think. I did find my way eventually, but for a moment I came close to giving in to a panic that said I was going to freeze to death or something. That's without a doubt the most afraid I've ever felt while hunting.
That was a good one as well. Kind of makes that whole " missing 411" stuff even more creepy.
 
That was a good one. That part with the scream/ strange sound was pretty creepy.
I think so. I finished writing this out then thought "maybe this was lame" so I gave the 2 minute version to my girl. Gave her the willies pretty bad, so I guess it's not just me.
 
I live in North Alabama. When I was 12 years old, my mother would drive me about 4 miles to drop me off to hunt in the morning in the dark. She dropped me & my Winchester 1300 pump with slugs off one morning and I started walking through a field with tall sage grass. I heard something moving to my right in the sage about 25 ft away. I shined the flashlight over there and two big yellow eyes turned towards me just glowing and the eyes seemed like they were a mile apart from each other. I held the flashlight on it and when I started walking again they eyes turned forward where I couldn't see them and it moved with me. When I would stop it would stop and turn eyes towards me again. This happened many times. This may not seem scary at all but I can tell you it was for a 12 year old kid who had heard a few stories of big cats from coon hunters around here and a few stories of when we had snow there was a couple sightings. Anyway, I got to my tree stand at the edge of the tree line and the entire duration holding my flashlight on it and climbed the tree with my flashlight in my mouth holding it on those eyes. When I got to the top of the tree I couldn't hold on the eyes till I climbed on up to the platform but they eyes wasn't there any more. I never heard it leave but it wasn't there anymore when it got daylight. What ever it was, it was very stealthy moving through the sage. I don't know why or how I couldn't see it's body. All I could see was those huge glowing yellow eyes reflecting back at my flashlight. I guess that was as scared as I have ever been as a kid. I don't know why I didn't shoot at it. I guess I didn't have confidence in hitting it with that old 28" bbl 12 gauge with slugs as scared as I was. If you've never felt like something was stalking you, then I guess you don't know what that feels like but I had that gut feeling that it was stalking me. Trust me, it's not a good feeling. In the late 90s, my neighbors brother in-law got some footage of a big dark colored cat ( bigger than a bob cat) with a long tail. It was recorded about a half of a mile from my parents house. I haven't heard any stories or sightings around here since the late 90s.
My Dad went to look at some Bulls for sale about 20 min North of me in Tennessee a couple of days ago. The fellow starts telling my Dad a story about some his cows looking like they were going to calve. Then he would check them again and the same cows looked like they weren't carrying calves anymore but there were no new calves around. Then he pulls out his phone and shows my Dad a picture of a big cat that the fellow took with his phone behind his shed. My dad said "Well, It Looked like one of those mountain lions you see on TV. It was dark brown though." When my Dad tells this, My son tells me: Yeah some one got a picture of a big long tailed cat over on the 1000 acre track next to us here lately on their game camera. That that track is about a 5 minute walk from my house. This is the first few stories I have heard of any sightings around here in years. It's still seems strange to me that there are any cats bigger than bobcats around here. Several years ago, I read online some where that at one time they were native to this part of the country.
 
So...reading through this thread while burning the late night oil, working on a customers concrete counters in a very dark part of the woods, with no lights other than a flickering halogen work light and no one around for miles... yeah, there's some noises out there that have the hair on my neck ready to stand!
 
So...reading through this thread while burning the late night oil, working on a customers concrete counters in a very dark part of the woods, with no lights other than a flickering halogen work light and no one around for miles... yeah, there's some noises out there that have the hair on my neck ready to stand!
This is why I love a good scary story

if you have any I'd love to here them.
 
My uncle's experience was the best story I can come up with at the moment. It's much better told in first person narrative, so ... read this in your best Sam Elliot voice.

Late 70s early 80s, I was cowboying at Eaton's Ranch in Wyoming. Beautiful, wild country with more than a few secrets hidden away in those mountains. We worked hard and played harder in those days. I was seeing this little gal, who later became my first wife and figured that a lakeside wilderness picnic and fishing expedition might be in order and just the ticket to impress this cutie.
We park the pickup at the trailhead and follow the stream up about a half mile with all the necessities on our backs, well almost all. Mort, my trusty blue heeler dog followed close. Camp is set up about 20 yards off the edge of the lake and we catch our limits of trout before dark and commence to cooking em up at the campfire. all in all, very romantic. As darkness settled in, our small fire the only light for miles, we all started feeling extremely uneasy. Now I've been guiding hunters, working forest service jobs and generally living in the mountains for years, so this uneasy feeling just don't set right, but being in a more amorous mood, I try to ignore it. It's not working. She feels it too. Mort's ears are erect and he's staring intently at the edge of the timber.
"Someone's out there" she says. Not some-thing, some-one.... Being a mountain ranch-raised gal, she's not the type to spook easy, and I'm immediately aware of the lack of weight on my hip, where the 44 mag Blackhawk typically resides. The image of it under the seat of the pickup flashes across my mind. "Almost all the necessities". We watch the edge of the timber and try to make out exactly what the hell is out there, or who... a figure, well, more of a presence moves parallel to the tree line real slow and stops again. Mort starts whining like he's scared. Didn't bark or yip, just a low whine. Trying to hope it's someone who just stumbled onto our camp and trying not to intrude, I holler out "Well don't be shy, come on in and have a drink!". No response. A little more movement, but nothing else. Then the wind starts to shift towards us and this God-Awful smell somewhere between rotting flesh and sh!t fills our nostrils and my plans shift immediately into how the hell we're going to get out of here. I tell the gal as soon as I get up, grab ahold of my belt and run. We have a long sprint on a dark trai the pitch black. I'm thinking to myself, we'll never make it. Whatever that thing is, it's big and not scared of us. I stand up, and she with me, hand firmly on my belt and we run. The figure steps into the Half-light, tall and big. We didn't waste any more time. In two steps, we were at a full sprint down the trail back to the pickup and the pistol under the seat.
Running hard through the dark, branches whipping at every piece of us, we could hear heavy footsteps behind us and across the stream.... gaining. We ran harder. It kept pace stride for stride, paralleling us across the water, snapping branches and ripping through the underbrush. Then, the sickening sound of water splashing and rocks shifting under heavy feet..... crossing towards us. We were close to the trailhead and I grabbed her hand off my belt and pulled her in front of me, my lungs were about to give out and she was as fast as I was anyhow. I told her not to stop no matter what. (Looking back, she wasn't going to argue the topic either way. She told me later, the thought to trip me along the way had crossed her mind. )
As she sped down the trail, I tried to keep up, legs and lungs about to give way, the steps were closing fast behind me and I was giving it all I had. I could feel the presence of a hand about to grab me the entire last 100 yards or so of the run. Any second was going to be my last. We burst off the trail and she was starting the pickup and throwing it in gear, I leaped in the bed on the move and Mort bailed in behind me. As the little truck peeled gravel and flicked on the headlights, we got outta there and back to the ranch in record time. We didn't say anything to anyone for years about that night, but it kinda bonded us together...for a while.
It rained hard for the next week and there was plenty of work to do at the ranch(that's what I told myself anyways), but dang it, all my gear was still back there. I eventually worked up the nerve to go back and get my stuff, this time loaded with a bit more iron. Getting back to the small lake and where our campsite was, not a scrap of anything we brought in was there. Bedrolls, fishing poles, skillet, everything was gone! I looked for a little bit, but that same uneasy feeling hit me again and I high-tailed it back to the road. Never went back.
 
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When I was 16 I killed a buck about hour before dark. By the time me and my buddy got down to him it was dark and we started working him up. Well a fast moving light streaked across sky and stopped above us hovered for few minutes and took off super weird and silent
 
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