Great now I am am gonna be scared outta my shorts at every freakin sound I hear this weekend. I grew up in Jersey and would try to find all the stuff in the mag "Weird New Jersey" (I think that is what it was called) when i was in High School so this stuff is always a draw to me. But dangit now I am just getting the willies thinkin bout all the weird stuff we would hear, see, what ever. I dont care how bad my buddy snores I am gonna hang right over him if he lets me.
I took some folks out for a one night backpacking trip in the Shining Rock Wilderness Area a few years back, & it turned out to be the most event filled trip I've been on.
First the car being driven by a couple & their son (fresh out of Marine boot camp) broke down. We left it at a gas station just off I40, piled everyone in the other two cars & continued.
Next was just that part of the group were 1st time backpackers & they learned to enjoy hiking & setting up & everything else in the rain.
But they had great attitudes
The rain continued, so we ate supper in our tents (yes, it was pre hammock days for me).
As I lay there in my little tent, enjoying the rain & a full belly, I fell asleep.
I awoke to a sharp pain on my ear lobe
I felt a wetness on my ear as I reached for my light. Sure enough, it was blood... not much, but some.
There was nothing to be seen & though I had left the net door unzipped, the rain fly was zipped & almost touching the ground.
Apparently a mouse had liked the smell of my ear lobe & took a bite
Maybe I wiped some food on it as I was eating supper & he thought it was a big, fat potato chipOh well.
Next morn, one man had told me that he needed to get back early, so he headed out before the rest of us started our casual breakfast routines.
We took our time & enjoyed the morning before starting our hike out.
When we got back to the car, the truck belonging to the man who had left hours ahead of us was still there!
We made a phone call to local rangers to see if they could help. I emptyed most of my stuff out of my pack & began to hike back to see if I could find him.
A mile or so in, I met him on the trail. He had taken a trail that forked off & took him waaaaaaay off course.
He had not taken my advice about finding another place to put his tent the night before & used the "bowl" that been formed by hundreds of other campers using the same spot for years on end. The rain had puddled deep in his tent, soaking everything he had, including his sleeping bag.
I estimated that his pack (that he had carried so far down, then back up the wrong path) weighed about 80lbs
He was totally exhausted so I took his pack & let him carry my near empty pack as we walked back to the parking area.
After that, it was smooth sailing<G>.
I too will something make and joy in it's making
I'm not sure where you were, but was it an area that has elk? A bugling elk is a very strange noise, and would certainly be frightening to someone that waited for a dark night to hear it for the first time. I'd guess hardcore hunting types should have known their sound, but not if they weren't from elk regions.Originally Posted by Cannibal
Also, someone using elk calls are capable of making some seriously strange noises (if they were trying to mess with hikers in a shelter)
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
heh... and I thought a loon was a weird noise. Thanks for that suggestion. I had never heard it before.
I may be slow... But I sure am gimpy.
"Bless you child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other way."
Mrs. Loftus to Huck Finn
We Don't Sew... We Make Gear! video series
Important thread injector guidelines especially for Newbies
Bobbin Tension - A Personal Viewpoint
just read that. gave me the screaming heebie jebies. I may have problems sleeping tonight.
"It had a cadence; three bursts of sound followed by two longer cries. The bursts were actually composed of about 3 different octaves each."
That sounds like one of the calls barred owls make when they are socializing. The "normal" barred owl call is Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-CAWWW. But when they socialize, they vary the pitch of very loud hoots and the CAWS become almost screams. If they don't freak you out, being near one of their convocations is like sleeping in the yard of a frat house on Saturday nite.
So, OK. This one is better around a campfire with some Bourbon and branch water, but:
Several years ago, I was cycling through Canada. Peddling west from Ottowa to visit friends near the Algonquin Provencial Park, I entered a region that reminded me of Appalachia or east Tennessee. I stopped in a small town for supper before riding on to camp.
The store was one of those general store/gas station/grills, typical of backwoods Canada: "Eat Here! Get Gas!" The counter had 3 stools, a greasy grill and a greasier cook. I had almost finished when three boys came in. They moved strangely. That's what first caught my attention. Their walk was similar to the "schyzophrenic shuffle" I had observed as a psychologist. Their hair was white and their eyes were so light as to be almost water-colored, but they were not albino. They were stair-step in size. The oldest was perhaps 14. I went to the register to pay and the boys brought their selections to the front at the same time. That's when I noticed that they had 6 fingers on each hand.
I paid and went out to my bike. The middle boy lurched up and patted the water bladder strapped to the top of my rack pack with his 6-fingered hand, and said, "drink water?" His pupils were small black dots in light, light blue-grey irises.
"Yes," I said, "it's drinking water."
He nodded wisely and lurched off after his brothers. I thought nothing more of the encounter. I had to find a campsite.
This section of Canada was fenced religiously. The sun was low before I saw an unfenced track that cut into the trees down by a small stream. The time was around 10 p.m. on a long Canadian summer's day.
Now, you have to understand that Canada in the summer is graced with a plethora of carnivourous insects. Noseeums are microscopic flying fangs. Then there are mosquitos, black flies, deer flies and horse flies. On a bicycle, you can outrun the noseeums, mosquitos and black flies, but the deer flies ride the slip stream to devil your back. The horse flies come in like fighter jets, take a plug of flesh, and then sit on the handlebars munching it like an apple as they decide where to take the next bite.
Due respect for self presevation dictates certain procedures when making camp. I blasted down the track at full speed, spotted a level spot, screeched to a stop, leaped from the bike, jerked the tent from its pannier and had one pole put together before the bike overcame inertia and crashed to the ground. I finished the tent, grabbed the bags, threw them in the door, dived in, zipped the net and spent the next 10 minutes killing the bugs that had come in with me. Satisfied that everything was secure, I went to sleep.
To sleep, perhaps to dream.... What a dream! It was the kind you try to wake up from. You've had them. You have to get out of it. You can't move. You try to sit up. Paralyzed. Ah, the toes can move! Now, you can shake your ankles. Harder and harder and UP! Awake. Wow. I hate dreams like that. I decided to have a candy bar and read for a while until I settled down. The whining of a mosquito interrupted that thought. I slapped it. And another one. And another. They were all over. I turned to the front of the tent. The net was unzipped. That was not possible.
I was freaked. I got out and looked around. Through the trees, a light. I looked closer. It was the back door of a pickup camper. Ah, another wandering soul. Still up. Maybe with coffee. All campers are brothers. A little conversation might help me calm down and get to sleep.
I walked to the camper. Knocked. No answer. I stood on tip-toes and looked in. An old man was collapsed on the floor. I tore the door open. He was not breathing. No pulse. But he was not cold. I started CPR in the cramped space. Fifteen compressions, breath, compression, breath, check pulse at the neck. Wet, sticky. Blood on his neck.
I made it back to town at record speed to the lone pay phone beside the general store. I called the operator - they didn't have 911. I was shivering when the ambulance pulled up accompanied by a patrol car. The officer was with the Ontario Provincial Police, Constable Gordon. My bike fit in the trunk. I got in the patrol car to direct him and the ambulance to the site.
The medics checked the old man, then told Gordon, "another one, no blood."
Picture being a transient alien in a foreign country...well, Canada is sorta foreign and I was a transient of sorts - one is transitory when bicycle touring - and being the only person near a suspicious death. I was not having a good night. When I heard "another one, no blood," I was in serious turmoil.
"What did he mean? What's he talking about?" I think my voice was an octave higher than normal.
"Where do you plan to stay tonight," the Constable asked.
"This whole thing is wierd that guy is dead my tent was open when I woke up I've got to be a suspect someone did that right before I woke up and you want to know where I plan to stay tonight like I might just crawl back in my tent for a good night's rest?" Maybe I was a little hysterical.
Gordon just walked over to the patrol car, made a short call, and said,"my son is at college. You can use his room. Come on, get your gear."
Of course, the reasonable thing to expect would have been to be cuffed, thrown in the back of the patrol car, set in an interview room with bolted down steel furniture, and sweated the rest of the night by tag teams of Good Cop-Bad Cop. Instead, Constable Gordon took me to his house. His wife had a pie on the table and milk. She visited while we ate. I told them about my ride so far around the perimeter of the US.
When she left for bed, Gordon said, "I've got some scotch in the den. Let's sit in there and I'll try to answer your questions."
He explained that for long before he was assigned to this district, transients had been found like that old man, bloodless. He and previous constables as well as the Mounties had tried to solve it without success. The best he had was speculation. The locals had lived in those hills for many generations, inbreeding. They had come from the isolated hills of Eastern Europe and these hills reminded them of home and helped them maintain the isolation they seemed to prefer. Their homeland was Transylvania.
Saturday night in the forest, just as I was starting to get into my jammies in the dark and slip into my hammock, there was a blood-curdling scream from a tree about 45 degrees overhead. This is a silent forest at night, and there wasn't a puff of wind to rustle leaves, so it was quite a shock! Hmmm...guess we got owls up here in the preserve. Funny thing is I was laying in the grass looking at the stars through the branches for an hour before that, and the owl was probably watching me, undetected, the whole time. Odd that I've never heard a sound like that from the owls in town.
spock: had me shivering in fear... vampires? what year was it? were there any newspaper articles on it? the death?
Here another one. This was when I was in secondary school. Every 3rd year, there will be a camp including the whole cohort of the 3rd year. It was held in a campin grounds which used to be a cemetery. Anyway it was already the 2nd day into midnight when suddendly we all heard a scream coming from the girls toilet. we ran to the toilet to see what happen. There was a girl on the floor crying and when we ask what happen, she said she saw a white figure near the cubicle. The camp counceller chase everyone out and got everyone to sleep in the canteen that night. By the next day the whole camp knew about it and at night no one dared to g to the toilet or went in pairs and did it asap espically the girls..
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks