34 Creepy Things Folks Have Found In Forests

Spent most of my childhood in the woods so I’ve got a couple stories.

The creepiest man made thing was likely a prank. Someone set up a bunch of those little Blair Witch stick people things around campsites the year it came out. I only saw brief bits of the movie before that but the older kids in my Boy Scout troupe were freaked out and I got scared second hand haha.

The actual creepiest thing was a live mountain lion. I don’t know if the wind kept our scent off it or if it just didn’t feel like messing with humans or what but the beast walked almost right through our camp. Probably 7-7.5 feet long. You don’t realize how big that is until you see it skulking past, muscles rippling under its pelt.

Found a tomb stone in the woods when we were kids. The area in front of it where the casket would be was sunken in about 6 inches. Looking around there were other similar sunken in areas but no other tomb stones. It was a woman’s name on the tomb stone and she was born in the 1800’s and died in 1914.

When I was 14, a friend and I would go fishing just about everyday of summer, we would walk about an hour to hour and half through the woods and over bogs to a series of rivers that we called the steadies, they flowed into a very large lake. The last trip there; we were walking along one of the rivers (the rivers are narrow, maybe 5 feet across) at 14 very easy to jump across from side to side, anyway we stumbled up on a large pile of animal bones, we kinda got worried but assumed maybe a hunter quartered their game there. We walked to the edge of the bank and right in the centre of the river clear as day was a large foot print, bare foot distinguishable toes, but just one, the left, it was big even more so magnified by the water, I called to my friend to look but as I said his name I heard a loud rumble, and the trees shaking on the other side. I looked to my friend but all I saw was the dust he was kicking up from running away, to which I promptly followed, never went back. We Told people no one believed us.

A dead raven skewered on a stick that was sticking up from the ground like a sign post. It had it's wings spread wide and beak and eyes open.

A sled caught in a tree branch about 30 ft in the air.

I had woods behind my house as a kid. I used to go back there by myself all the time and explore. One day when I was 12 or so I stumbled across what looked like a little campsite under dirt and tree outcropping. There were towels, clothes, and some car parts scattered all about. This is fairly odd for a small stretch of woods in a regular neighborhood. I didn’t think anything much of it then cause there was plenty of junk like tires back there anyways.

Two days later, all of the kids in the neighborhood played a nightly game of hide and go seek tag. While my sister was looking for a hiding spot, a random man jumped out from a bush and ran into the woods. My sister ran home to tell our parents that a strange man was hiding around the neighborhood. The cops were coincidentally in the neighborhood at the time investigating car break ins. Turns out the guy my sister came across was stealing car parts and hiding them out in the woods behind my house...

We camp alot. Where we camp there are a lot of old mining cabins out in the mountains along the forest service roads. No one is ever back there except people ripping through in a jeep. We were camping one time and my kids brought a metal detector with to see if we could find anything. Barried about 3 ft down around one of the old cabins was this big 1ftx1ft metallic rock. Looked almost like silver. It was very heavy and would go off under the "precious metals" setting on the metal detector. We wrapped it up in a towel we had laying around and set it in my truck. We were certain we found something expensive. When we got home, I grabbed it and thought that's weird it seems lighter. I unwrapped the towel to find a bunch of broken twigs. My kids(11 and 13) thought I was messing with them. We still go back every year looking for it but have no clue to this day why it was gone. Maybe cursed and a good thing it's gone?

A staircase leading to nothing and no signs of a previous house being at that location.

A raccoon head. Just the head, pretty fresh. I checked it out pretty carefully and it hadn't been decapitated with a knife or anything, so I figure an owl had sat in a nearby tree picking it apart and just dropped the head. But it was... unsettling.

Pack of rats surrounded us in the night when we took out food. Lots of rustling leaves, realised they were rats when we shone our torches and saw those eyes.

This place we called the "tar pits." They were these deep ruts in the ground, maybe 3-4 feet deep, and they were filled with this purple/green muck that acted a lot like quicksand. It sucked whatever stepped in it in. If a small vehicle got stuck in it, it normally took a bulldozer to pull them out, with significant damage to the vehicle in the process. The stuff would rip the bumper right off of a vehicle while being pulled out.

One summer, we had a brutal drought, and the tar pits dried up. The bottom of the holes was a giant pile of bones. Animals that I figure stepped in it and couldn't get out. A lot were clearly deer, with some squirrels, possums, and some that could've been foxes or dogs.

I would still love to know what that was. I haven't been over there in years, I don't know if it's still like that.

My friends and I went canoe camping in a new provincial park. We had this neat trip planned, we'd get flown into the middle of the park with out canoes, and canoe our way out over the course of a week.

First night, everything is pretty normal and cool. Next day, we go over to the head of a trail up a mountain. (Mountain is a little bit of a misnomer, it's Ontario so our mountains are pretty small). The base of the trail is in a campsite. We get out of our canoes, and go up into the campsite to find the trail.

The campsite is a wreck. Like, clothes tossed all around in the mud. A dehydrated meal, that someone clearly hacked into with a knife, barely eaten. Snack wrappers and trash. A couple pairs of shoes. Three different tarps, torn down and muddy. A sleeping bag, I think. Thing you wouldn't expect to be left behind, even with the messiest of campers. No sign of anyone around (but plenty of evidence there had been at least 3-5 people here). No sign of a canoe. Keep in mind, this is a lake you can ONLY access via several days of canoing/hiking or a plane.

To this day, we don't know what happened there. It was a week before we got out of the park ourselves (and we were in a rough state when we did, it was a very rainy trip) so we never really found out what had happened. Some members of our party said that they saw a canoe at the site the previous night (because they'd wanted that site, and it had been occupied.) but we woke up hella early and didn't see anything leave. Our best guess is still that someone had an emergency (maybe hypothermia. It was real rainy), they'd called out for an emergency rescue, and in their haste left behind a lot of stuff.

Edit: okay guys, I hear you, you think it was a bear. I highly doubt it, and here's why:

- No tracks. This is the big one
- The campsite was missing a lot of the essential things. Like tents and packs. They clearly had time to pack up *some* gear.
- There was a lot of partially eaten food out. The dehydrated meal still had a spoon in it, and it had been opened in a way to make a bowl. Bears don't have that much dexterity. There was baggies of trail mix, still sealed.
- The mess was *very* human. There were clothes that had been laid near the fire or over logs, and the shoes were also set up to dry.

A white van hidden just off a main dirt track . The back was open and it was full of black plastic bags full of dope plants . There was no one to be seen. I got outta there real quick and went down a track you needed a 4x4 to drive down.

My mother’s story- she had gotten out of the car to stretch during a long drive, and she came upon a clearing maybe five minutes into the woods. On one side of the clearing was a tent with someone moving around inside of it. Inside the clearing was a pile of deer carcasses ( maybe 20 in all) and one dead golden retriever on top. She was so freaked out that she ducked behind a bush-only to find a set of women’s lingerie and a pair of high-heeled shoes crammed under the bush. She ran and never looked back

I still get the creeps from this story.

An old tin roof shack with piles of clothes and voodoo bottles. My parents owned a large piece of property with fields, patches of woods and multiple dilapidated 100+ year old structures. Out of all the creepy shacks and barns, the one that gave me the heebie jeebies was one in the woods at the corner of our property by a swampy pond. It was uninsulated with a bare wood floor and no lights and a deep hole outside for water. There was a old crusty whitewall tire tied to a tree like a swing. My dad said when they first moved out there 30 years ago there was an old black man that lived there called “the preacher man”. He had a guitar and would play songs and sing spirituals and stuff. He said the old guy would roll a wheelbarrow up and down our deserted country roads singing to himself and collecting junk out of the ditches. Hence the mound of leftover garbage still inside the shack. The woods were always quiet around there, which was nice for hiking around during the day but got spooky in the evening. One day I noticed that there were old bottles placed high up in the branches of a bunch of the trees around the shack and the pond. Supposedly it had something to do with voodoo.

A child's drawing nailed to a tree deep off the path.

I’m sure this will be at the bottom. But anyways, I was out hunting at our normal spot. Mind you this was almost 13 yrs ago. I’m sitting in my spot, see the deer, nothing worth shooting. I’m enjoying watching the animals. It’s getting to the magic hr( twilight). About 85 yards away is this tree line. That bumps against the other property. I’ve been hunting these woods for the better part of almost five yrs. I noticed something big and black moving against the tree line. It’s moving some what cumbersome. My first thought was it’s another hunter. Get kinda upset that he decided to mess around at this late in the game. All of a sudden he takes off sprinting, this creature takes 4-5 leaps and has crossed this tree line. Mind you it’s nearly 200 yrds long. This creature maybe took 6-7 leaps and cleared it in about a few seconds. My buddy and I, had walk-in talkies to keep each other informed about our locations or if we saw deer moving to each other’s locations. I immediately tell him that something “human” is moving along the tree line at an insane speed. After I talk to him and he confirms it. I nope the hell out of there. Never saw it again.

A pair of shoes along with an old nokia phone.

When I was around 12 years old, I was in the woods across from my house with my cousins. There are a few spots with random junk strewn around (country folks love dumping garbage places for free), so we were poking around. We found an old fashioned milk can and tipped it over. A bunch of liquid spilled out - followed by a dead baby pig. We completely freaked out and ran home. Probably should've told our parents...

Maybe not that scary but kinda weird in handsight.

My grandparents lived on a pretty isolated farm that was located near some woods. As a kid, I sometimes went in there (but never too far). One time I found a wooden sculpture of a bird in there. I brought it inside the house to show my grandparents because I thought it maybe it belonged to them, but they told me they had never seen it before.
At the time, I didn't really think too much about it. But later, I randomly remembered it and started thinking about how weird it was that I found it there. Like I said, my grandparents lived pretty isolated, but the sculpture had to end up there somehow right? From what I can remember, it was definitely too heavy to be able to be carried by the wind, so I think that someone came really close to my grandparents' house and then left it there for some strange reason.