Pic related. When I was a kid I was walking with my mom along the road just down the street by a treeline and tied to one of the trees by it’s neck was a baby doll.
Very unnerving.
We never found who did it or why.
Years later I was out with my mom again in another part of the woods and she swore she saw something that looked humanoid and albino, like all white. It scared her enough that she wanted to leave right then.
Still think about both of these from time to time.
I’ve had some close encounters with a moose, a mountain lion, and a lot of bears but they’re not really “unnerving”. The scariest thing to find in the middle of nowhere is definitely signs of human activity when you think you’re all alone. Crude shelters, weird little effigies, anything that makes me feel like I’m trespassing into someone’s space. Makes me very paranoid about if I’m being observed and how well they’re going to take it
Used to find weird wooden sculptures like some shit out of Blaire Witch in the woods around my dad’s house where I spent a lot of time roaming around as a kid.
One time also saw a Great Horned owl sitting up in a gnarled old oak tree at night and it just sat there staring at my friend and I ominously, not moving not hooting like you usually expect an owl to or flying off like a startled animal typically would. Also those things are fucking HUGE, it was one of the most unnerving things I ever experienced out there.
I grew up deep in the mountains so the woods typically don’t scare me even at night even without lights, in fact hiking at night I prefer a no lights policy with my cousins as we know the area extremely well but that owl sticks with me.
i found a developed camp someone made in forest service land a couple years ago. they’d brought out a couple couches, built some stairs and a rail into the slope, had a loft in a tree. two old boats that had clearly been worth something at some point were just abandoned out there. there were also a couple dolls heads hanging around, and a rolled up carpet that i was relieved to find was empty. i was working at the time and my crew and i poked around a little bit but didn’t want to run into whoever made it so we left quickly.
another time, i found a beaver skull in a long stretch of protected sand dunes along the coast, far away from creeks or streams or anything that id picture in my mind as beaver habitat. no clue how it got there, but i found tons of bones out in those dunes, without much vegetation it’s pretty easy to find that stuff, but the beaver was the most wtf for sure
also i heard a mountain lion in heat screaming at night one time while a friend and i were about to get high. mustve been within 100 yards, probably closer. thank god we hadn’t started already because if youve never heard a mountain lion scream it sounds just like a person. second we heard it we just took off running, didnt even say anything to each other, pure instinct. that was scary as hell in the moment but pretty cool to have experienced once it was over
The trail out behind my parents house wasn’t really /x/ material but the mixture of fields, woods, and raised levees meant that you could see just about everything from some spots. It’s really eerie looking out into a clear winter night and seeing the bobbing of flashlights a mile away, only for them to turn off all at once. I liked to take late night walks out there when I was a kid, preferring to do away with a flashlight to enjoy the glow of the moon. One night a group of men in a pair of trucks drove up the old dirt road by the trail where they got out and talked or argued with each other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but I remember them leaving very quickly. I think they might have seen me and bolted. I ran home after they left. Didn’t like that one bit.
Animal Death
Not that long ago on a crisp November evening I found a neat little pile of guts (with a heart stacked on top) next to another neat little pile of guts (without a heart stacked on top). It took a minute to register what I was even looking at, then I freaked out a little, then I remembered it was deer season and someone must have done a field dressing. You’re not supposed to hunt in that place so it was kinda neat to see evidence of poaching.
On my night jogs I used to go on I’ve heard kids chanting off in the woods and of course the occasional dog charging me straight out of the darkness. Oh, and the more severe horror of stalkers in shitty vans.