Despite hearing tales about will-o’-the-wisps all my life, I still followed a mysterious light deeper and deeper into the woods, and it was only the sound of a foghorn blowing almost directly beneath my feet that roused me and prevented me from tumbling off a cliff into the Ohio River. I was less than two feet from the edge, and I didn’t even see it.
I once camped on a semi secluded beach with a couple of friends. That night we were on the epicenter of an earthquake and also we saw a big red scar looking thing on the sky.
One of my friends acted as sentinel and did not closed his eyes the whole night, he was expecting the sea to recede and come back as a tsunami, gladly nothing happened.
Later, in 2010’s earthquake the sea got out in that very same beach, it wasn’t a full tsunami but videos showed how scary the sea can be.
Probably the foxes or coyotes screaming in the middle of the night, sounding like someone being murdered in the woods. That or the time we woke up to snuffling outside the tent flap and found bear scat in the campsite the next morning.
This is more scary than creepy, but I got stuck in a tropical depression on an island. Thunder everywhere, pouring rain. No shelter other than a tarp. Only way to get off the island is a canoe.
Hmm. I was expecting a lot of comments about bears and wolves and getting trapped under snow but I guess no. There’s none of that stuff where I live and I’d be terrified tbh.
Personally, I don’t know if I’ve had a creepy experience while camping. Surely I’ve hated the leeches crawling all over the place and getting inside the tent occasionally but fortunately using the extra strong repellant kept them at bay.
I was third wheeling on a 3 day trip with my friend and his girlfriend. We had hiked a good 15 miles into the backcountry at this point and made our campsites not far from a small stream. We all had dinner together, and afterwards I went back to my smaller campsite a little ways away to give them some privacy. It was already dark when I got to my camp, and as I was taking off my boots I looked down and saw a grasshopper on the ground. It was laying on its side, with only its antennae moving.
Except, it’s antenna were…weirdly long? I never remembered them being quite that long and thin. And they were slowly wiggling around quite a lot, in ways I didn’t think antennae could move. So I leaned in to take a closer look.
They were not antennae. Rather, it was a parasite that just ate it’s way out of the grasshoppers head and was writhing itself out of its now hollowed-out host toward freedom. Over the next few minutes, I sat transfixed in front of this unholy scene illumated only by my headlamp and watched as this worm slowly made its way out of the insects body. Occasionally the grasshopper’s body or legs would twitch, I’m guessing after the parasite rubbed up against a nerve on its way out. The parasite was easily twice the length of the grasshopper itself, or at least that’s how much of it I saw emerge. I didn’t stick around long enough to see it fully escape.
After a few minutes, I suddenly remembered I was supposed to be sleeping 6 feet away from this thing and sprung back to my feet as a shiver went through my whole body. I tore down my camp in record timing and relocated to a different spot about 100 yards away.