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.