Dec 27

It Continued Right Past Our Campsite

A listener writes “I’m a veteran of the military from East Tennessee who has seen quite an interesting side to our military. Just to put it into perspective, as others have done before, I held a very high security clearance with numerous compartments. I’ve gone through a full scope polygraph and have seen everything from underways on a submarine to the mountains of Afghanistan. I’ve worked with special forces and intelligence agencies. I say that to say this, I’ve been a trusted and productive member of society. What I write to you now, though, happened 2 weeks before I left for boot camp.

One of my best friends and I went camping in December of 2005, in a vast wilderness area near Jack’s River Falls, in the Cohutta Wilderness area of northern Georgia. I was leaving for boot camp in 2 weeks, and he was going a couple of months later. This was a trip just for us. It was a bro-trip where we could go deep into the woods and be away from everything before our lives drastically changed. We were camping along a river situated between two mountains, many miles from any town or other trails, at a time when there is the least amount of traffic, too.

It was around midnight when it happened. As we were talking next to the fire about what our futures looked like, we heard an incredible splash in the river around 30-40 feet from us. It sounded like an enormous animal jumped several feet off of the rocks into the water. And then we heard it walking/splashing the 20-30 feet across the river towards us. We both stood up as close to the fire as possible and stared into the black abyss. It was distinctly two legs moving through the water, just a splash-splash, as if an Olympic heavyweight wrestler was crossing the river.

And then it stopped right at the bank. I have never been so scared in my life. We were too scared to speak or even look at each other at that point… just staring into the abyss beyond the firelight. I honestly don’t know how much time elapsed. It felt like an hour, but in reality it was probably 10-15 minutes. Nothing happened! Total silence, only the crackling of wood on the fire… all the while, I kept expecting to see something or someone come running into the light, charging us like a berserker.

After what seemed like an eternity, we heard it start walking around us, the whole time remaining just beyond the blackness of our firelight. It felt like it was within 20 feet or so of us – just remaining out of site – intentionally. We heard an obvious left-right-left-right walking pattern. It sounded like a freaking dude walking in the woods. This was the end of December, and there was all sorts of leaf litter and sticks on the ground. You could obviously hear every step. It continued right past our campsite and up the mountain on our side. We listened, not saying a single word, until several minutes after the last walking sounds. We couldn’t wrap our brains around what had just happened.”

2 Responses to “It Continued Right Past Our Campsite”

  1. richard r

    i guess when you look at it from afar, these incidents maybe happen less than 1% of the time out of millions of camping trips. i still think i would be one of those that would unluckily run into one of these things on my very first one if i ever go camping.

Leave a Reply