Significant pucker factor, no doubt.Originally Posted by Vanhalo
Significant pucker factor, no doubt.
Well, there was the time I was hiking solo and fell down a mineshaft...
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I was out camping with a buddy. After going to bed, I put in some custom-molded earphones—the kind that blocks sound—so I could listen to music for awhile. My friend got my attention, and I pulled out the earphones. Next, I heard the sound of a demon spawning, and it was definitely close. I was sure it had come for me. Much to my relief, the sound stopped and went away. I calmed down and went to sleep.
After some conversations with better woodsmen than myself and some exploration on YouTube, I figured out it was not a demon that interrupted my musical bliss, but a fox. I hate foxes.
A fox scream is the very devil of a sound. Long ago, whilst walking along a forest trail at night I heard the fox, like a maiden screaming it was, a blood curdling sound that has left me shaken to this day. Verily, foxes are the hounds of Lucifer!!!
Or not, they're actually kinda cute...
Last edited by Chard; 11-25-2017 at 22:17.
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Same here. Sounded for all the world like the shower scene in Psycho. I've camped solo many nights and thought I'd heard everything, but this sound required all the logic I could muster in order to convince myself it was an animal.
I learned that there are 3 (at least) animals that make such sounds: screech owls, pumas and red foxes. I was in Harriman State Park in NY so it could not have been a puma, and after looking at YT videos of owls and foxes I concluded it was definitely a fox. I've seen red fox there as well, two times.
So far I have heard noises at night on two different occasions that I could not identify.Too bad I had no smart phone then but it there's a "next time" they will surely be recorded.HOWEVER,I just watched Terror in the Woods on Destination America where three guys had an apparent Big Foot encounter.Now that was terrifying.I noted that two of the guys refused to come to the aid of their partner who singlehandedly had to stand down the beast.So,like getting snakebit,he found out who his friends are!
Barred owls make some weird sounds too -- if you hear wicked witches cackling insanely in the middle of the night out in the woods.........................
On a solo trip last spring a barred owl pair starting hooting it up around 4:30am. They were flying around because the sound kept changing directions. Then I look up and one of them landed in a branch directly my head.
So much for sleeping in that morning
Old post but new to me Cannibal, so I just had to bring it back again for the newer folks in here. Way too funny my man.They are randy little critters and not to be trusted. Search for "Cannibal" and "raccoon" and you'll find my tale of tarp indignity.
I've had gators calling less than 10' from my hammock.
I had a hunter take a shot on the first day of gun season without ever seeing my setup. Fun way to wake up!
I've had a bear immediately on the other side of my tarp snorting around.
I've found coyote tracks under my tarp in the morning...that weren't there the night before!!!!
I've been lullabied by wolf calls in the middle of the night. Course there were about twenty of them up the hill...all in their pens.
I heard a sound in the Smokies that I still haven't been able to ID and still keeps me awake from time to time.
I had a dream I was falling, but didn't wake up before I hit. Turned out, I was falling and I dang sure woke up when I hit!
I've had a squirrel stand on my ridgeline, right above my face, and yell at me to "WAKE UP"!
I have pretended to be a lighthouse with my headlamp more times than I could ever hope to count, trying to find whatever made 'that' noise.
But, the thing that scared me the most, was the wind. First time I was tied to a tree of small diameter and a storm came through in the middle of the night, I learned the value of large trees. See, the leaves in the canopy of the small trees act like a kite and trap the wind. When it does that, it moves...a lot! As it happened, it was the head-end of my hammock that was tied to the little tree. When the big gust of wind came, it felt like someone kicked my head from under the hammock. I was bounced awake and on full sci-fi/horror film alert. Probably pretty easily, the most scared I've been in a hammock. It only lasted a moment, but I remember it well.lb
I suppose my scariest time with wood was when my wife and I were quite young and lived in a four plex in Helena. We parked in the back and always used the back entrance instead of the front entrance with that had a common area between the four apartments.
In the middle of the night there was a loud knock on the front door. I hopped out of bed supposing it was one of my friends who had stopped by for some insane reason or the other. Since we slept nude, I grabbed a tee shirt and held it over my junk when I opened the door. Much to my surprise it wasn't one of my friends, but a rather large biker looking kind of guy who was equally surprised to see me. In a gruff voice he said "Is Pumpkin here???". (Now Pumpkin was a, shall we say, a lady tarnished reputation who lived in the apartment upstairs.) I replied "Nope, she lives in apartment 2."
Well my inebriated visitor looks at the door, looks at me, looks at the door, and looks at me. I takes a peek at the door, and bigger than a big dog, is the number 2 in all it's glory. Needless to say, all my glory, fled about that time.
In spite of all his other short comings, math was not one of them, and he replied "THIS is apartment 2."
Oooooooooooooopppps!Me thinks.
About that time my wife piped up from the bedroom and said "Pumpkin lives up stairs, but she said she was going to be gone for a few days." Fortunately, and apparently, my wife's voice must not have been the cigarette and whiskey gravelly voice that Pumpkin had cultivated over the years of pursuing a variety of vices. That was enough to clarify to this wayward son of anarchy that, indeed, Pumpkin was out and about and not in apartment 2, as much as I had tried to convince him other wise.
Oh dear,...you said "in the woods"....my bad.But comes to think of it, with all the years of working in the woods, my scariest moments have come...in town. I haven't told you about the one with the dude beating on the door in the middle of the night, or the one where the thief craps in the middle of the living room, or the one about the hit and run side scrap, or the one about the gun pointed to my best friend's head in high school, or the three gangster looking dudes from Vegas who thought we were moving in on the two young female hitchhikers they had picked up, also with guns.
Then again if you want real pucker factor, ask a vet. Now that is some seriously heavy sh*t.
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