Avid campers and outdoorsmen of Reddit that often go deep into the wilderness what is the most unsettling/unexplainable thing you've seen or experienced?

1. Found a nice camp spot way out in the woods. Drop my gear. Start to set up my tent. Decide I have to take a piss, and go behind a couple of trees to find a good spot. There are two spines, full spines, impaled on sticks stuck vertically into the ground right behind the campsite. Noped the fuck out of there and camped miles away.
   — Janus408


2. I used to work at a Boy Scout Summer Camp. Every week I had to take a big group of campers to a "secluded" spot for their wilderness survival badge where they had to build a shelter out of sticks, leaves, etc and sleep in it overnight. The spot was only about 1/2 mile from the main camp, but we took them a circuitous route that made it seem really secluded. Anyways, on this one night in 2004 all the campers had made their shelters, we had cooked dinner, and were all just sitting around the campfire. It was getting late, maybe 11:00, so I sent all the campers to their shelters for the night and started cleaning up the fire. That's when we heard in the distance what sounded like church bells. They were pretty faint, but myself and my fellow staffers could definitely hear them. They went on for about 30 minutes, ringing every 30 seconds, or so. We were all a little creeped out, as there were no churches or towns within 20 miles of us. After the bells stopped, though, the singing started. It was too faint to hear the words, but it sounded like church choir music, but **a lot** of people, and **a lot** more enthusiastic. Also, it was almost midnight at this point. The singing went on for well over an hour, sometimes quieting down until we almost couldn't hear it, sometimes getting so loud we thought it was getting closer. All of the campers were super creeped out, but I lied to them, telling them there was a church service going on in camp, and that there was nothing to be scared of. Eventually, at almost 1 AM, the singing stopped. I found out a few days later that there had been a large KKK rally only a few miles away that night, and that's what we had heard.
   — VVillyD


3. This is such a long story and I’ve written it out multiple times so I’ll keep it simple – I was attacked by 6 grizzly bears in Yellowstone. I was with 3 other guys, we didn’t know we camped 100 yards from a dead elk so bears started piling in. Because it was a wolf kill, the bears will share it (kind of). My buddy got blood on his pants (didn’t know at the time) and we left the area but it was getting dark. The bears followed us all night because the blood. We had to light sticks on fire and throw them at the bears as well as using bear spray. I video taped myself explaining what happened because we decided we had a 50/50 chance of living until the morning. I wrote the old show “I shouldn’t be alive” and they said our story matches the standards they would want for the show but because it was only one night, it’s not a long enough story to make it to the show. I have pictures I took throughout the night still but deleted the “final will and testament” video. 13 years later I would pay $1000 to have that video but the concept of uploading it “to the cloud” wasn’t an easy option.
   — donutshopsss






4. A lean to type shelter with signs that the site was fresh. There were a bunch of Polaroid type photos of people in places I recognized as being in that woods. Candid type photos from a distance. There were no other cars on the way in. I'd had that odd feeling of being watched all day. Stumbling upon that sight was unnerving. I headed home (wasn't that far from home). I know it was probably just some homeless fellow, but I felt very uneasy and decided to trust my gut and not stick around. Not worth the risk. Went back the next weekend and the site had fresh photos and the site still looked freshly occupied. Probably nothing, but I felt very unsettled.
   — Professor01011000


5. I once woke up covered in daddy long-legs. I knew they were harmless, so I wasn't worried, but it's still pretty freaky to wake up with a dozen arachnids crawling around on your sleeping bag.
   — Bizmatech


6. In the Unsettling category: Backpacking in AK. Decided to traverse down backside vs. taking same path back down the front. Walked into a beautiful blueberry patch. I’m sitting down, picking a nice snack and I hear something rustling nearby. I look over and there’s a feisty black bear cub enjoying the same blueberry patch. Cute af!! Buttttt, Mama Bear was nowhere to be seen. Of course my body instantly clicked. Not exactly the situation you want to find yourself in. But, I’m here to write about it soooo...
   — CSirizar






7. I was hiking in Montana and found a massive grave yard of cattle and horse skeletons. Pretty sure some rancher was dumping them out there. There were hundreds of them.
   — thewalkingklin123


8. I remember being in the equivalent of the Boy Scouts . It was pretty far from the nearest town about 15km. Around 10km from a paved road and a kilometer away from a dirt path. So as you may think nearly everyone thought that the whole guard duty is stupid, until it was my turn to patrol. I remember it was very early morning 3-4 am. Just as our (there were something like 4 patrol pairs) shift was ending. We heard a shout and saw a “patrol pair” racing toward us. They said that two guys are in the bike tent. This was quickly relayed to other “pairs”, and instead of trying to see what is happening to the bikes, we all started to run towards the guardians tent. It took some time to wake them up, thinking at first that we were all trying to pull a practical joke on them since nobody would steal 10+ year old bikes. Reluctantly they went to investigate and indeed found signs of somebody using brute force on the bike rack. And lubricants and a tool missing (I forgot what it was). They thought that it may be a drunk or a junkie wanting to steal a bike, but this theory failed as they organized a search party quickly to follow the footsteps, with the trail ending at the dirt path. From my perspective it would be impossible for a drunk to cover a kilometer in around 20 minutes. I believe that the guy behind it was an owner of land nearby that didn’t even try to hide his hatred for the scouts. I believe he did it with a friend just as “retaliation” or something like that.
   — Marekolo100


9. I was a Girl Scout for many years. During the summer camps, the counselors would often do this thing called the "12 hours", where'd they basically send you alone in the woods with a pack of supplies, some tarps and rope and you'd have to make your own shelter and fire and stay overnight in the woods. This was an activity only reserved for the older scouts of course. So, upon being given a spot to set up camp, I made a makeshift shelter in between two pine trees. It looked pretty snazzy and everything went well. Then, I tried to fall asleep in my shelter, my head resting near the pine trees. I was woken up in the middle of the night to the feeling of something crawling on my face. I woke up with a jolt as a daddy longleg spider crawled off of me and into the pine tree. I have no idea why I did this. But young, 12 year old me thought, "I'm going to see where that thing is going." I shined my flashlight at the tree. That night, I learned something very significant. Daddy longlegs live in pine trees. The fucking tree my head was resting on was covered in **hundreds upon hundreds** of fucking daddy longleg spiders. The two trees I used to built my shelter were practically a mating ground. I refused to build my shelter near pine trees after that.
   — Smash_Gal






10. I have a medium sized boat so my friend and I went to a nearby island for some fishing and staying the night. We made tent, cook some dinner and when we went ito the ten the noises from the bushes start to be heard.We panicked so we started to run to the boat which was nearby and some wild hog started to run in front of us. So we spent the night in the boat and picked everything in the morning. The end...(Yea not so unexplainable but it was unsettling)
    — cocokako