NWTF 2022 Spooky Stories

I got a pretty good story, figured it would be worth sharing and making someone laugh.

We hunt a cattle farm in the middle of Missouri that houses a good number of coyotes. One morning I was walking to our tree while the coyotes were going crazy within about 150 yards of me. Naturally I’m on guard keeping an eye out for a straggler on the fence line I was walking down. Little did I know the cows had bedded down right on my path. They jumped and I literally crapped my pants! I never saw a coyote but I now have a lifelong fear of walking through cattle field in the dark.

Instagram: @lucass_holmm

In May of 2021, my friend and I were deep in the mountains of southern Colorado. We were shed hunting, and we’re having some pretty good luck. After picking up a lot of elk and deer sheds, we decided it was time to start hiking back to the car. By this time, it was getting dark, and we still had a long ways to go. In the pitch black, my friend and I slowly made our way down the mountain, when I thought I heard something move to my left. I shined my headlight over to it and sure enough, there were glowing eyes looking at us. We had been seeing lots of mountain lion tracks all day, so I could only assume we were being stalked. For the next hour and a half, everywhere we looked we saw green eyes looking at us. The bushes were always moving, and sticks were always snapping. The only thing we could do was sing our favorite songs loudly and keep our pistols close. We finally made it back to the car and drove off very fast. It’s safe to say we won’t be hiking out in the dark in that area again! 

IG @clayton_peak_

…One drizzly August morning last year, me and a good buddy decided we were gonna go crow hunting. We walked out to the edge of the bean field and figured we’d hunker down on the edge of the woods and call them over. For whatever reason, we got out there way early and were set up a half an hour before daylight. We sat in the dark with our unloaded shotguns and waited for the woods to wake up. All of a sudden, we heard a deer-like bound through the woods followed by a high-pitched shrieking squeal behind us about 75 yards back and decided to load our 12 gauges. We snuck out of there after the rain picked up, unsure of what we heard. THREE DAYS LATER, in our small town of Shepherd Michigan, before football practice, an Emu ran from the southwest (from the direction of the woods, about six miles) through the baseball diamond and through town before being caught by the police. The emu escaped from a breeder an hours drive away the previous week. I’m not saying we heard the emu, but it wasn’t no bobcat or feral hog running around the woods that dark morning.

Nothing super spooky so far, but one that sticks with me was finding a very old liquor bottle under a big oak tree way back in a chunk of national forest. No trail going in, surrounded by 50+ year old pine and dense underbrush. Just a reminder that we aren’t the first ones to touch some of these wild spaces, not by a long shot.

I found a human skull in a beaver dam while trapping. Turned out it was off a Halloween skeleton. Glad I took a closer look before calling the police!

I was archery elk hunting in Colorado’s West Elk Wilderness. Weather was warm and not much daytime bulging. I settled in on a ridge overlooking two previous years avalanche slides hoping to locate a bull to stalk. A perfect spot to take a nap. 

I laid down flat of my back unzipped my shirt to stay cool and slipped into a slumber.  Sometime later I was awake enough to feel what I thought was a bug crawling across my chest. Eyes still closed; I reached up to brush the bug off when all heck broke loose behind me. I jerked to my knees and turned around just in time to see a black bear hightailing it in the opposite direction.   

I am not sure which one of us was scared to most, me or the bear. One thing for sure, I was no longer in the mood for a nap and stayed on high alert the rest of the hunt. 

It happened on a Sunday morning on October 16th 2022. I’m hunting in Alabama and it was the second day of bow season. With it being my first season of being 16, i was alone. I’m walking through a field to get to my stand that’s in a bottom with a creek. I turn on my light and about 2-3 minutes after I turned it on, a scream/howl sounds off at the bottom where my stand is. I’m still not able to identify what it was. I listened to a bunch of owls and it’s not one of those. Too much of a scream to be a coyote but too much of a howl to be a bobcat or any other cat. Anyway, I don’t think much of it and continue to walk in that direction and get to my stand. I look around with my light before I climb up in the tree stand and don’t see anything although I had a feeling something was there. I get up in my stand and turn my light off. My light was off for 30 seconds to a minute when a loud voice lets out that sounds like a little girl saying “Daddy? Help. Where are you?” The voice was so loud that it echoed through the bottom. But instead of a distressed tone, it had a calm and relaxed voice. The voice also came in the same direction as the scream. I never heard it again and never saw anything. The stand (which is typically very good) was dead that day. I only saw one squirrel the entire morning. I understand this story is hard to believe but I am telling the complete truth. I wasn’t just hearing things. The voice echoed. I don’t know what it was or what it could have been but by far the creepiest, weirdest, but most interesting thing I’ve ever had happen to me.

First day of fall hunting last year I was up on a mountain in a tree line looking down into a large open area about two acres in size where I had seen turkey fly down into off the roost. As I was listening intently for the sound of wings through the noise of the woods awakening, I noticed that all at once it became dead silent. No birds, no squirrels, no nothing, just the wind. My first thought was that there was a predator in the area so racked a round into my 12ga. I was sitting in a rocky outcrop with my back against a pine when I heard what I at first thought was another hunter, as the footsteps sounded bipedal coming in behind me down the mountain. At first I was mad because what ever it was, was walking very loudly through the woods. I thought whoever it was was a rookie about to blow my spot, then the footsteps stopped for a minute or two and then I heard something moving very fast toward my position coming from the same direction as the footsteps had been. Then from about 40 yards to my left three deer broke the tree line running full speed down the mountain. I watched as they went through the field and disappeared into the opposite tree line. A few minutes later I heard a loud screeching sound from the opposite side of the field around where the deer had entered. I waited with my heart in my throat for about five more minutes and then all the normal noises of the woods came back. I got out of there walking down the mountain spinning in circles with my shotgun up the whole two miles out. I got in my car and I refuse to go back to that mountain. I have no idea what I experienced and I honestly don’t even wanna guess.