3 Disturbing TRUE Camping Horror Stories

This experience happened to me in 2020. The world was shutting down because of COVID, and everyone was cooped up in their homes. Being an avid backpacker and camper, I used COVID as an excuse to travel to different national parks and camp out in various places.

One of those places was a creek in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Without giving away my identity or revealing too much personal information, let's just say something happened with my job back in 2019 that caused my reputation to kind of suffer a bit; a good number of people despised me. I had to change apartments, get a new phone number, and eventually quit my job.

The mistake I made caused a good number of people to lose a lot of money, so the storm was expected. I just didn't know how far it would go. I was literally getting harassed by different random numbers for a while; some texts were even threatening.

I didn't know if they were from the same person or different people each time, but I considered the possibility that it was one person texting me from a bunch of different numbers. For a while, it seemed to stop, and I was grateful that people seemed to lose interest or just move on. I wasn't working around this time; I was taking time for myself, hence another reason I was traveling around to different national parks.

I drove the three hours to Rocky Mountain National Park, parked my truck, and started my hike up the trail to the creek. There was nobody else there. I’m sure that was because this was right when the lockdown started, and people were taking it very seriously and not leaving their houses.

That, and it was also still wintertime. There was a thin sheet of snow on the ground, hard enough that it made that loud crunching sound with every footstep. After a little while, I made it to the creek, and it wasn't frozen; it was still flowing.

It was incredibly peaceful, and this was a detox I needed from the stresses of my life at the time. I found a place a little ways off the path to set up camp. After the tent was set up, I chopped up some wood, started a fire, and cooked some sausages on the stove.

Then I started reading my book by the fire. After finishing a few chapters, it was getting dark out. Thank God for headlamps!

I rolled a joint and started smoking it. After a few hits, I felt my phone start going off. Honestly, apart from my family, I don't have a lot of people texting me, so I pulled out my phone from my jacket pocket and saw a bunch of texts from an unknown number.

My heart skipped a beat when I realized it was happening again. The texts were from a number with a 203 area code, which I looked up to be Connecticut. Whoever it was texted me saying, "How's your camping going, buddy?

" The second text said, "It's beautiful out here. " The third text said, "I see why you came up here. " My default reaction was to respond, "Who is this?

" If they had simply left it at "How's the camping going? " I would have assumed it was a family member, but they were sending messages as if they were here with me. The weed had already entered my system, and I was definitely high; this did not help my anxiety one bit.

I felt extremely paranoid and started looking around me, standing up and doing a complete 360, looking in every direction out to the increasingly darkening woods. I went to get my P365 handgun from my bag just to make me feel safer. Usually, I'd put a fire out before calling it a night, but as paranoid as I was feeling now, the thought of being in total darkness freaked me out.

I went into the tent and crawled onto my sleeping bag. I stared at my phone at the texts, waiting for a response, which didn't come. Minutes dragged on, and I just wanted the weed to wear off.

Honestly, I still had my headlamp on, so I tried to continue where I left off in my book, but between being high and my mind being stuck on those texts, I was kidding myself thinking I could read. I decided to just watch YouTube videos on my phone to pass the time. I didn't feel comfortable going to sleep just yet; I was watching some murder documentary on YouTube.

I know, a pretty interesting choice considering the setting, and when I least expected it, I got another text, a response to my question before they responded. "Doesn't matter anymore. " My heart started racing all over again.

I replied back, "How did you know I'm camping? " but once again, no response. After this, the anxiety of this situation was weighing heavier and heavier on me.

Was this a prank by a friend or family member, or was this one of those people harassing me again? But if it was the latter, how would they know I was camping? That's the really uncomfortable part.

I managed to kill an hour just watching videos on my phone, and I noticed the glow from the fire outside was growing dimmer and dimmer as the fire died down to almost nothing. In the wintertime, without the sound of bugs, the woods are dead silent apart from the wind. On a windy night, the second the video would stop playing, the silence would become deafening.

Usually, I'd embrace the peace, but my peace was completely disturbed because of these texts. Something then broke the silence: the unmistakable sound of human footsteps in the snow. They approached my tent until they were only maybe six feet from outside the tent.

Then the footsteps stopped. I had the gun tightly gripped in my hand. "Ready to turn the safety off.

" There was suddenly a flash from outside. It looked like someone briefly shined a flashlight at the tent, or they took a picture. I had my answer soon enough; I heard the person walk away, and before their footsteps slowly faded out to silence, as I expected to happen in the back of my mind, my phone dinged and vibrated.

That number sent me a photo. The photo was of my tent. Following that was a text that said, "Have a good night's sleep.

" I can't explain it, but suddenly, it felt like I completely snapped out of the remainder of my high, and a bout of adrenaline and confidence overwhelmed me. I unzipped the tent and shot two rounds into the air. The sound of footsteps running away in the snow in the not-so-far distance told me that it worked and scared the person off; but it also disturbed me even more that it meant they were still hiding somewhere in the distance, watching.

I screamed a thread into the air and climbed back inside my tent. I believe it worked because there were no more texts and no more sounds of footsteps. I was awake for hours after simply because the occurrence completely woke me up.

I felt like I drank three cups of coffee. Eventually, I did fall asleep, and waking up to morning sunlight was a huge relief. Whoever followed me there was not ready for me to pull a gun.

I definitely didn't seem like the type of person who would own a gun, and I know that was my first time shooting that gun since buying it, and in fact my only time to this day. Whoever had been texting me, harassing me, and apparently stalking me apparently decided to back off when they found out I had a gun because almost five years later now, I haven't been bothered. Still, it was a nightmarish night, and I can't imagine how differently it might have turned out if I wasn't armed.

During my childhood, every year my family would have a tradition where we'd all go up to Northern Michigan for a weekend in October. Our Uncle Jim used to own a four-acre property up there. The house on the property could fit a lot of people, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Two bedrooms were set up for my cousins and my siblings, so my brother and sister in one room and our four cousins in another room. The other rooms were for all of our parents. My Uncle Jim has always been a big hunter and fisherman.

He'd go on camping trips specifically for hunting all around the country. My dad has gone camping with him a few times, even though he's an animal lover and would never harm a fly. Part of the four acres that my uncle owned was a big chunk of forest.

He marked a lot of trees with red paint to mark the property line. Beyond that was just forest owned by the county. I don't know; the nearest house in that direction was probably miles away.

My brother Adam and my cousins Jake and Joe all came up with an idea at lunch when our dads were talking about hunting. We wanted to go camping in the woods that night. Our dads were on board with it; they were definitely already kind of drunk, so more likely to say yes to stuff.

Our moms weren't as on board, but they didn't directly say no, so my dad and Uncle Jim took the four of us into the woods with a tent. My girl cousins and sister were not involved in this; it was just us boys. They led us into the woods, and when Joey, the youngest of us, started complaining that it was too far, they started laughing.

That's how our dads are when they're together, especially when they drink; they loved messing with us as kids. Speaking of ages, I'm the oldest—at the time I was around 13, Adam and Jake were around 10, and Joe was around 9. We went beyond the property line as there was this small clearing in the woods with a bunch of soft, green, mossy-looking stuff that my uncle referred to as deer beds.

I'm pretty sure he said it was perfect for a campsite and that he's used it before. My dad and Uncle Jim kind of gave us a half-drunk lesson on setting up a tent. They made us help out so that it wasn't just them doing all the work.

It was a really big tent, big enough for four people, especially kids. Once it was set up, we put our sleeping bags inside. We did this during the day because, obviously, it was infinitely easier than doing it at night.

After all of that, we went back to the house and played games outside until dinner time. At dinner, our moms again expressed that they weren't fans of this idea, that we were too young to be out in the woods alone. Our dads insisted that we'd be fine, and I remember my dad making a joke that we'd be close enough for them to hear our screams if something were to go wrong.

It wasn't until later on that our dads led us back into the woods to the tent. We all had flashlights and extra blankets since it was cold at night. I also brought a deck of Uno cards for us to play.

When we all got situated in the tent, my dad and Uncle Jim left back to the house. We were suddenly alone in the woods. Honestly, we weren't as close to the house as you might think; we were deep enough into the woods where you couldn't see any light from the house.

We started playing Uno for a while; I'd say half. . .

An hour at least playing Uno is actually a really good time killer; it passes the time really well. Well, the tent was lit up by our flashlights arranged in a circle. All was fun and swell until we heard a scream in the distance.

It sounded like a girl’s scream. We all went silent and looked at one another with the same faces. I then remembered that Fox's scream sounded like the scream of a woman, so I told everyone that.

I saw how freaked out Joe was, especially, but my statement calmed everyone down. We continued to play Uno. I actually won like every single round.

At that point, no one had mentioned the scream again; it was most likely out of all of our minds. But it happened again, and much louder and closer this time. This time it sounded a lot more human.

We all went silent again. This time, even I was freaked out. Joe looked like he was going to cry.

I told everyone to turn their flashlights off. We crawled to our respective sleeping bags and sat in the darkness. None of us had the courage to run out into the woods back to the house.

It’s that fear of running and being chased and just catching the attention of whatever was out there with the sound of our footsteps. Somehow, hiding inside of a cloth tent felt like the safer option. So we waited and waited in silence.

We still whispered amongst each other, wondering if it could still be a fox. I was truthful and said, "I don't know; hopefully. " I don't know who heard it first, but we all sprung up and looked at one another again when we heard very fast footsteps crunching the leaves approaching the tent.

Then they stopped, and there was an ear-piercing, gut-wrenching scream that sounded like a girl or woman's scream. It was right outside the tent, and the tent started shaking violently. All of us started screaming.

Jake and Jim were screaming in fear, while my brother and I were screaming stuff like "Get out of the tent! " I unzipped the door to the tent, and one by one, we all ran into the woods with our flashlights on. The only reason we could see anything that run back to the house was the most on-edge moment of my life—like a life or death kind of feeling.

We made it to the property, screaming the whole way, and our entire family was already outside in response to it all. Four of us made it back safely. We explained the screams and the tent shaking, and they were all shocked and horrified based on their reactions.

Then I noticed our cousins Jamie and Christina and my sister weren't outside. I called out my dad and uncle, accusing them of sending one of the girls to scare us, but when he showed us that the girls were already in bed, that's when it was clear someone we didn't know was out in the woods. Our dads went out to the woods with a couple of rifles and returned after a while, having found nobody.

The next day, we all helped in bringing the tent and other stuff back to the house. Obviously, you can guess that that was a one-and-done thing. We never camped out in those woods again.

Hell, we didn’t even play outside after dark anymore. What kid would after such an experience? My guess is as good as anybody's as to who was outside of our tent and why they were doing what they did.

What I'm about to tell you still leaves me to question what is real and what’s not. This happened to my dad and me, and even now, two years later, I get chills just thinking about it. I know how it sounds; if I were you, I wouldn't believe it either.

But I swear to you, every word is true. Two years ago, my dad and I traveled to go camping at a spot out in the deep country. We enjoyed doing this as it was often a very nice time to get away from real life.

This place in particular was a nice spot—hiking trails, zip lines, a bit touristy, but it has deep history: Native American lands, you know. The first night there, it was perfect—families at other campsites, campfires everywhere, kids laughing; the kind of peaceful night you go camping for. We cooked hot dogs, roasted marshmallows, cracked open a few beers, and made small talk with the people around us.

A typical peaceful first night. But the second night is when things started to change. The staff told us we were the only ones in the park; nobody else booked a site.

At first, we were psyched— a whole campground to ourselves. It sounded peaceful. We spent the day hiking, fishing, taking it slow.

At one point, we listened to a scary podcast while sitting by the river because, you know, why not lean into the spooky atmosphere? We thought we were being funny. By the time the sun started setting, we were feeling good—a little buzzed from the beers, tired in that satisfying way after a long day outdoors.

We decided to head to the park's information center to charge our phones and grab some snacks before it got too dark. The walk back to our campsite—that's when the unease set in. The woods felt different; the air was heavier.

The sky had this weird tint, like twilight didn’t want to leave. My dad turned to me and said, "Doesn't this feel off? Like we're in some kind of dream?

" And he was right; it did. The forest felt endless, stretching out in every direction. My chest got tight.

I couldn't shake the feeling that we weren't alone. We didn't say much after that, just kept walking, both of us glancing over our shoulders like we… Expected to see something lurking in the trees back at camp, we stayed close to the fire. We didn't really talk about the weird feeling; we didn't need to.

It was like we both silently agreed to keep things normal, pretending nothing was wrong. We roasted marshmallows, played music, even smoked some weed to try and distract ourselves. Not the typical father-son moment you would expect, but by the time the sun dipped below the trees, we could no longer see what was in front of us except for the fire.

That's when the uneasy feeling had grown into something worse. As we sat by the campfire and roasted some s'mores, I want to say, at about 9:00, we heard a noise. It was a bang, as if a tree fell.

It came out of nowhere, loud and close; it echoed through the woods from the direction of the river, maybe 100 yards away. We grabbed our flashlights and pointed them toward the sound, but there was nothing—no movement, no glowing eyes, nothing. “Bigfoot,” we joked, a nervous laugh slipping out, but neither of us believed it.

A few minutes passed, then it came again, louder this time, farther off, but the same sound, same weight. We shined our lights again, but the forest swallowed our flashlights, allowing us to see only the trees surrounding our tent. And then the third bang—closer.

That's when the fear hit; whatever it was, it was moving toward us, like it was circling the campsite. Then, not even before we were able to collect our thoughts, the fourth bang happened about 20 yards away, maybe less. That's when the real fear and adrenaline set in.

Whatever high I had going from the weed was now long gone. My dad turned to me with his eyes wide. I saw the fear in his face.

We agreed to get in the tent. We quickly scrambled and threw the last of the firewood onto the fire, hoping the flames would scare off whatever was out there. Then we scrambled into the tent, leaving everything else behind.

I ran inside of the tent and quickly dropped to the ground, lying flat, my dad moving a little slower, following right behind me. As he was about to get into the tent, the loudest bang happened, so close it felt like the ground shook. My dad froze, staring out into the dark.

I said his name, grabbing his attention as he stared in shock. Then, quickly jumping into the tent, he muttered, “It's standing there. ” “What's standing there?

” I asked. “I don't know,” he said, his voice trembling. “It was like a wall of darkness.

” He sat by the zipper as I buried myself under my sleeping bag, trying to move as quietly as I could. He sat there, clutching the only weapon we had: a small knife. Useless, really, but it was all we had.

Then came this vibration noise that is still hard to explain to this day. It started low, like a hum, but it wasn't just sound; it filled the air. It was a feeling inside of us, making our chest tight.

I've never felt anything like it. My dad whispered, “You hear that? ” I couldn't answer; I just nodded, too scared to make a sound.

With the feeling as if we were being hunted, this went on for about five minutes as we sat in silence. Then this other sound came. It wasn't an animal, and it wasn't human.

It was this guttural, alien-like noise, as I like to put it. It honestly sounded like the Demogorgon from *Stranger Things*—nothing I have ever heard before. We stayed frozen in that tent, too scared to breathe, too scared to move.

I had this small mesh window right by where I was laying, but I refused to look outside of it with the fear of being seen, just sitting there, trying to control my breathing as my dad still sat there with the knife. And that's when the weirdest thing happened. In the middle of all the chaos, we just blacked out.

Neither of us remembered trying to fall asleep. My dad was still clutching the knife when we woke up, lying in the middle of the tent. I woke up on my back in a panic, as if something was standing over me.

My first thought was to grab my phone to check the time, but it was dead. I asked my dad to check his—“Dead too. ” Both had been fully charged the night before, making sure we had them working in case of an emergency.

We stepped outside to pee. As we stood five feet from the tent and peed back to back, still scared out of our minds, we saw that it was still pitch black outside. The air was cold and still; the food we left on the table was completely untouched.

The fire, which we had stoked before diving into the tent, burned down to ash like it was never touched. The whole place felt wrong, like we shouldn't have been there. We waited the night out in the tent without saying much to each other, just trying to get some real sleep.

We packed up in silence, not saying a word until we were in the car. When we finally talked about it, we realized we both felt the same thing that night—watched and hunted, like something was waiting for us to slip up. We told my mom when we got back; she thought we were crazy, said maybe we got drugged or inhaled some weird gas.

But it wasn't that. Whatever happened that night, it was real. We both experienced the same thing.

To this day, we don't know what it was. We didn't see it—not fully—but my dad came closest. Whatever he saw, it wasn't human and it wasn't natural.

We never heard any similar story like ours. We haven't been. Back to that camping site?

Since we haven't even gone camping since, I don't think we ever will.