3 Outdoor Horror Stories That Will Make You Fear the Dark

SPEAKER_1 (0:22)

I've posted a shorter version of this before, but I left a lot out. At the time, I could barely talk about what happened after we packed up our tent. I kept stopping to reread what I'd written, and then I'd delete most of it, because I didn't want to spend the rest of the day thinking about it.

It's been four years now. My girlfriend from that trip is my wife, and she read through this before I posted it.

There are a couple of things she remembers more clearly than I do.

There are also things I wish neither of us remembered.

We camped for the night in Stanislaus National Forest, near Big Trees in California. I don't mean inside the state park or at one of the actual campgrounds. We'd driven farther out and turned onto a dirt forest road, then followed it uphill until we found somewhere to pull over.

We were only about 15 minutes off the main road. That was something I kept telling myself later.

Fifteen minutes didn't sound remote. It sounded like we could leave whenever we felt like it.

I'd been camping probably 50 times by then, but almost always with a larger group or at a dedicated campsite. My girlfriend, Alyssa, had been a handful of times. We'd both had a miserable couple of weeks at work, and the whole idea was to spend one night somewhere quiet. No reservations, no neighbors, nothing planned for the following morning. Just dinner, a tent and the drive home. We got there early in the afternoon. The road climbed in long bends, doubling back across the same hillside. On one of the lower bends, we passed an old logging spur that dropped out of sight through the trees.

Farther up, we found our clearing. It sat a little above the road at the top of a bank, with enough room for the car and a tent.

Somebody had clearly camped there before, although there wasn't any trash or anything that suggested anyone had used it recently.

We drove a little farther to see what else was around, but a locked gate blocked the road about a quarter mile beyond the clearing.

There was a broad turnout on our side of the gate, with several pickups parked along its edge. We turned around and went back. I parked facing out. I remember being pleased with myself for doing that, because I normally backed into a branch, or had to turn around six times when we left somewhere.

The front of the car was maybe 20 feet from the road. We put the tent another 20 feet behind it, where the ground was mostly level. One side of the clearing dropped away into the woods. The other side ran uphill through thick brush. Behind the tent was a fallen tree with most of the bark gone, and behind that was a shallow dip full of dead branches. Standing up, you could see over the fallen tree. Sitting on the ground, you couldn't see much of anything past it.

That dip is something I need to explain, because when I told people afterward that I'd shown a flashlight around and hadn't seen anyone, some of them acted like that settled it.

There were places within a few yards of our tent where a person could have been completely out of sight. I hadn't chosen a clearing I could see all the way around. I'd chosen a flat place where the tent wouldn't hurt my back.

We walked around a little before unpacking. Alyssa found an old, mostly overgrown track, leading away from the far side of the clearing. It went downhill at an angle, wide enough that a truck must have used it years earlier.

We followed it for a few minutes until we came to a washout. Beyond that, we could see part of a dirt road through the trees below us.

I thought it was the lower bend we'd driven along on the way up. There was a pale rock sticking out of the bank beside it that I'd noticed from the car.

We went back and forgot about it. For the next few hours, everything was exactly what we'd come out there for. We unpacked. I struggled with a tent pole that wasn't actually stuck. I was just putting it together wrong.

Alyssa sat on the cooler and made fun of me. We ate chips before dinner because we'd both skipped lunch. Maybe four vehicles passed during the afternoon. They were pickups mostly, with men in hunting clothes inside. I assumed they were hunters leaving the forest. One driver lifted a hand. Another didn't even look toward us. The last vehicle was a gray pickup with a black rack over the bed. It went by around the time I started cooking. There were two men inside. The passenger wore an orange cap, and I noticed him because he turned his whole upper body to look back at the clearing after they'd passed it. I gave him a little wave. He didn't wave back. I didn't take that as a warning. People look at other people's campsites. I'd been doing it all afternoon. The pickup continued downhill. I heard its engine for a while, then couldn't hear it anymore. We cooked dinner on a little propane stove and drank a couple of beers.