What He Found in the Woods: A Scary Story

My uncle spent about thirty years working as a forest ranger in one of the largest national parks in the US. He retired last December. Over the years, he’s told us tons of stories; his weeklong mountain hikes and his crazy encounters with all sorts of wild animals. He’s even helped save people who got lost or who got into accidents of one kind of another.

My point in saying all this is to show he was and is a brave and courageous man. Nothing ever really got to him in the two decades and four years he spent in the wilderness. Nothing, except for the encounter he had in the summer of 2002.

My uncle had just come back to the park after a three-day break and was called into his supervisor’s office almost immediately. The head ranger told him that several small campfires had been spotted in a remote corner of the park for by hikers. The fires had all been spotted far away from the usual trails and campsites.

My uncle has said several times how all kinds of sketchy people use the parks for their illicit activities. The previous month they had found a meth lab around this same area and had gotten some of the people involved arrested. When you have such a large open space and only a few rangers to patrol it’s easy for squatters, illegal hunters, pot farmers and all sorts of people to slip in.

My uncle was assigned to head out to this part of the park and see if he could figure out who was making the fires.

 Normally, he would have been accompanied by at least one other ranger on his trek but because it was peak camping and hiking season all of his colleagues were too busy to go with him. My uncle had been an outdoorsman all his life though, so he wasn’t at all afraid of going solo for a day.

 He got a lift from another ranger who briefed him on where the fires had been spotted and after being dropped off at the head of the trail his colleague drove off and left him alone.

Now, this trail was particularly isolated and very few visitors walked it. The woods were also very overgrown. Bears and other large wild animals inhabited that area too.

My uncle though knew what he was doing and felt confident he’d discover what was up within a few hours. He had handled these sorts of calls before and almost always the fires were caused by a few teens just camping and partying somewhere they weren’t supposed to.

He got to the site of the first fire within a couple hours. What struck my uncle immediately was the odd location. Whoever had been here had made the fire right in the center of the hiking trail. That was strange since most of these fires were lit away from the trail because people didn’t want to be caught.

My uncle took a closer look at the remains of the blaze and started to sort through the ashes. That was when he found the bones. There were dozens of tiny bones belonging to a variety of little woodland creatures. He identified most of them as belonging to squirrels, chipmunks and sparrows with at least a few parts of a rabbit.

While the location of the fire was odd, it wasn’t unheard of for people, usually teenage guys, to come out and hunt small animals illegally. My uncle called into headquarters, told them what he found and moved on down the trail. He kept an eye out for shoe prints or other traces of humans but didn’t see anything,

He went on for another hour before he found a second fire. This one was slightly further away from the trail and from what he could tell was more recent than the first. Once again he found many bones from small animals among the ashes but this time the bones had been arranged into a pentagram with the fire in its center. Additionally, strange pictographs had been drawn in the ashes with what he guessed was a small stuck. He said they looked like caveman drawings or something you’d see in the Native American exhibit of a museum. Some were stick figures of people with large eyes or small animals. There also some stars that looked like pentagrams and a few odd spiral shapes.

Well, even for someone like my uncle with years of experience in the woods this was freaky. He now thought that these people were way more sinister than he had imagined. Worried about proceeding he radioed his superiors and called for help. Though the head ranger admitted that my uncle had found something scary, he said all the other rangers were still too busy and to go on alone.

So my uncle reluctantly kept going, keeping his eyes and ears alert as he moved. He eventually came across some tracks in some mud, human footprints, and followed them away from the trail. The tracks took him to a stream where they stopped. My uncle followed the stream’s path for almost half an hour before he spotted a thin stream of smoke rising on the opposite bank behind some tall grass.

He radioed what he was seeing before crossing the water and wading through a mass of tall grass before arriving at a small clearing. In this tiny pocket of open space between the tall grass and the forest he found the smoldering remains of a fire lying in front of a small hut made from grass.

In my uncle’s own words, he said it looked like something a stone age tribe in the amazon would make for shelter. The hut was on ground level and was made with bound blades of tall grass wound together. Once more, the entrance to the hut was splattered with dark red stains.

After announcing himself several times to make sure the campsite was abandoned, my uncle cautiously peaked inside the hut. As he put his head he was immediately overwhelmed by a rotten smell that forced him to back out and gag. When he was finally to stomach the odor, he tried to look again and this time he was greeted by scene of horor.

Inside the walls of the hut were completely covered with the skulls of small animals. Birds, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits. There were so many covering the walls that my uncle couldn’t see the grass behind them. He said, it was literally as if someone had wallpapered the hut’s interior with skulls.

My uncle covered his nose to keep the smell away and then looked at the ground where there was a flat slab of black rock and a blood-stained knife lying on top of it. All around the rock was dried blood and bits of rotting fly covered gore.

When he saw that, he immediately backed out and made ran back across the stream. He had just arrived at the other bank when he heard a sharp whistle from the direction of the hut. He turned and scanned the grass and the tree-line above it.

He looked at the branches two times before he saw a thin chalky white figure standing in the center of a branch just staring at him. My uncle and this ‘being’, as he described it, looked at each other in silence for several moments. It was hard for him to make out too many details with his naked eye, so he pulled out his binoculars.

He still gets a cold and distant expression on his face when he talks about what he saw. The figure was a woman, something my uncle could tell immediately through the binoculars as she was completely naked from the neck down. Her body was extremely thin, almost emaciated and she was covered in a thick chalky white paint. The truly frightening part of her was above her neck. Her face was hidden behind a mask made entirely of small charcoaled bones. This mask left only her eyes exposed. These eyes were wide with what my uncle described as just manic with wild energy.

My uncle took in this crazy sight for several tense moments before slowly lowering his binoculars and calling out to her. But as soon as he did that, the woman let out a hysterical cackle, took one step back and dropped straight down, feet first from the branch.

Well, my uncle immediately bolted from the scene. He frantically radioed for backup as he ran and eventually made it all the way back to the head of the trail where a group of rangers met.

They went out the next day, following my uncle’s directions and found the fires and the hut again. While some of the other ranger’s had doubted my uncle’s story about the hut and the naked girl with the bone mask, they were all in a state of disbelief when they looked inside and saw the skulls, stone and knife for themselves. After searching the area they found several large traps used for catching squirrels and rabbits as well as a small bb gun which had probably been used on the birds.

My uncle said the police did get involved since there was some concern that the person who had been catching and killing these animals would be a danger to anyone else in the park but despite a very lengthy search and investigation the naked woman with the bone mask was never found.

My uncle thinks that she was someone with deep mental issues, who probably fled deeper into the park and died of starvation or other natural causes. He bases that on how thin she looked meaning that she probably wasn’t getting enough food to sustain her body. He can’t think of any other explanation that’ll make him sleep well at night. 

'Behind The Doors' A Scary Forest Story

I was five years old when my mother passed away in a car accident. My dad never remarried and so he raised me and my older brother alone, with a lot of support from my grandparents.

Because I didn’t really know my mom too well, my dad always told me stories about her so that I’d have some idea of who she was.

He mostly told funny stories about the times they spent together; Their first dates, his awkward proposal using my uncle’s accordion etc. But there was one story he told me, when I was about to graduate from college, that even years later makes me go cold thinking about.

When he told me this story we were alone on the porch of a cabin we had rented for a few days. It was kind of a last family trip before I went off to UCLA for my Masters. My dad had been drinking a little more than he usually did and I think that’s why he finally felt comfortable telling me this unusually creepy story from the early days of his relationship with my mom.

 

The story goes like this:

In 1977 he and my mom met as sophomores in college at a dorm party. To celebrate their one year anniversary, they decided to take a trip to a nearby national park and go hiking for Memorial Day weekend. Their classes ended on that Friday so they actually had four full days to trek before they needed to go back to school. 

 

They drove off to the park, left my dad’s pickup truck in the lot and started their trek in the middle of Friday afternoon. The first day was spent hiking through some gorgeous wilderness and taking in the beauty of the nature.

They set up camp on the edge of a small lake and watched some deer by the shore before enjoying a few drinks around the campfire. My dad said that this was the day he knew that he loved my mom and when he began to seriously think that she might be the one.

The smile on his face when he talked about that first day was, well something that makes me smile now.

The next day they started up early, before sunrise. The next stop on their trek was a small mountain that was pretty much at the center of the park. Their plan was to camp at the base and then hike up to a lookout point about halfway up the slope on the third day.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. The map my dad had of the park’s various trails was actually a few years old. What he didn’t realize was that the Park had altered its trails around the mountain the previous year and so my parents quickly got confused.

 

Eventually after a lot of debating they decided to pick a smaller trail that split off from one of the main ones. Based on the map, it seemed to match with a lesser traveled trail that my dad thought would lead to their campsite.

 

As you might have guessed, that didn’t happen. While they did get within sight of the mountain, the trail they took them deep into the forest. Eventually it just disappeared altogether. They could have turned around but by the time it became obvious that they weren’t where they needed to be, the sun was already starting to set. So my mom and dad decided to just keep moving towards the mountain until they found a place to sleep for the night.

 

Since there wasn’t really a trail to follow anymore, they had to make their way through some dense vegetation and clusters of trees.

 

Just when they were beginning to think that they might have to hike at night, my mom spotted tall grass in the distance.

 

They stomped their way through the brush and emerged into a field. My dad said that as he stepped from the trees into the field he immediately felt uncomfortable. There was something about the field that he did not like at all.

My mom, it turned out felt even worse. She was so uncomfortable that she began to rub her shoulders. That was her tell, my dad told me, for when she was nervous.

She wanted to go back into the forest. My dad did too. But by that time the sun was almost down and there was a good chance that had they kept going through the woods they would get way more turned around then they already were.

In the end they both agreed that it made the most sense to just bed down for the night and get a fresh start in the morning.

That said, the feeling on uneasiness around the field just persisted even after they set up their tent on the edge of the field and built a fire.

 

Unlike the first night where my dad and mom and spent hours talking and joking around the campfire, they were both strangely quiet. It was something that my dad said they both felt but couldn’t quite explain. They ate in silence and as the night went on, there was this feeling that something dreadful was waiting to happen.

 

My dad says he has no idea why they both felt so uneasy as nothing up to that point had really happened. The clearing was small and pretty normal looking. The only thing obviously out of place was the quiet and the stillness. No breeze, no animal sounds and no movement in the air.

And then they put out the fire. My dad had just finished pouring some water on it when they heard it. It was a woman singing.

The voice was soft at first but within a couple minutes it had grown much louder.

 

The song, my dad said was unlike anything he has ever heard before or sense. He said it echoed all around them rising and falling. The strangest part was, he said, was that just like the field the song was not eerie or creepy. It was incredibly beautiful. So much so that to this day he has not heard a song that really equaled it.

My parents sat in the dark listening to the woman singing for a while. They tried to guess where it was coming from but it sounded as if it was all around them.

 

My dad was so entranced he started to move into the field but my mom grabbed him and told him to come into the tent and just wait it out. He said that her touched snapped him out of whatever trance the music had put him in.

 

I asked why they didn’t just pull out their flashlights and look for the mysterious singer but my dad said the song literally had affected to them so much that they just couldn’t think clearly at all.

 

They laid down in the tent together for some time, listening to the singing until eventually both he and mom finally passed out from exhaustion.

 

My dad woke up a few hours later. He doesn’t remember having a nightmare but he said that when he sat up in the tent, his shirt was soaked with sweat. He was breathing hard and my mom was up too. The first thing they noticed was that the singing had stopped. Second, the song had been replaced by the sound of something making their way through the woods behind them. They listened in silence as whatever was coming got louder the closer it came to them.

 

Within about the minute the heavy footsteps and cracking of branches was joined by a very faint yellow light that started to get brighter.

As soon as the light appeared my dad, who was frozen before by the song, grabbed his large survival knife and decided he was going to investigate whatever it was that was coming.

 

He told my mom to stay put, unzipped the tent and peaked his head outside. He saw him almost immediately. A few feet away standing between two trees was a thin middle-aged man holding a lantern. My father called out to him and asked him who he was, but the man didn’t say anything and just kept coming at an extremely slow pace.

 

My dad climbed out with his flashlight in one hand and his knife in the other. He shouted at the man that he had a weapon and he better stay back and explain himself. But again he just continued. That was when my dad noticed something about the man’s face. He said, this man’s eyes were extremely wide. It was like he was looking straight into something terrifying and couldn’t keep his eyes off it. Not only that but, he wasn’t blinking at all and his mouth was hung open. It was like his facial expression was frozen but he kept walking; holding the lantern in front of him.

 

Seeing the man’s expression completely through my dad off and he said he just watched him in silence. He reached the left side of my mom and dad’s tent and without speaking, blinking, or closing his mouth. The frozen man walked straight passed my dad without looking at him and continued into the field. My dad looked into the grass to see if there was anything there but as far as he could tell, there wasn’t.

 

He watched the man enter the grass and kept a close eye on him until he entered the center of the field and for whatever reason blew out his lantern. My dad turned on his flashlight and scanned the field trying to locate him but the man was gone. He had vanished.

Completely freaked out, my dad stood guard the tent for the rest of the night occasionally shining his flashlight around to check for the man. When dawn came, he told my mom to pack up the tent so they could hike their way back to the main trail and get the hell out of the park. While she scrambled to put everything away he decided to walk into the field and see what he could find.

 

The grass was thick and so he had to wade through it before he reached the center. He didn’t find anything strange at first but then he felt something hard beneath his feet. He pulled several clumps of grass out and found an old plank of wood with scorch marks around it’s edges. At that point he looked closer at the ground and realized there were a ton of burned pieces of wood hidden beneath the grass. He also found roofing tiles and a few odd pieces of destroyed furniture. And then, he found it.

 

Almost exactly where he thought he had seen the man disappear my dad found a pair of chained cellar doors that in his words looked as if they were covered in scratch marks. Like a cat had been clawing at the outside. The doors led straight into the ground and in a tiny of the field that for some inexplicable reason had only short grass around it.

 

My dad’s concluded that the cellar had been just outside of the house that had apparently burned down in the center of this field.

 

The lock that kept the chains together was massive and was still intact despite being very rusted.

 

As he studied the doors from a safe distance my mom came to join him and asked what he was looking at. When she saw the doors my mom clutched my dad’s arm. They stood staring for a few moments before they heard a light series of knocks coming from behind the doors.

 

My mom and dad were frozen in place until there was another series of knocks followed by a woman’s menacing laugh.

 

Well, that was it, they immediately bolted back to their stuff and high tailed it out of there. My dad said they practically sprinted the whole way back to the main trail. They constantly looked behind them to make sure they weren’t being followed.

 

In time they found their way to a ranger’s station and reported the strange incident. The rangers they spoke too seemed to believe them and said they would investigate the area but as far as my dad knew they never found anything.

 

For years after my dad said that my mom had recurring dreams about the field and the chained door. He said sometimes, especially in the first few months after they got back to school, these dreams would keep her up all night. She told him that the dreams were pretty much all the same. She would follow the man with the lantern into the field where he would lead her to the open cellar doors and usher her down them. She would stand at the entrance look down and see the outline of a thin woman with raggedy hair just staring at her.

 

My dad never had those dreams but he said that trip also kept him up sometimes and he wonders to this day just what exactly was behind those doors in the woods.