A listener writes “I believe it was the summer of 1987. My boyfriend at the time and is now my ex husband and I went camping at a family member’s place in Cook’s State Forest in Pennsylvania. The camp sat along the side of a mountain, about a mile from the river.
Late that evening, after the fire had burned down, I heard something moving in the woods. At first, I thought it might be the same porcupine that had wandered through camp earlier, but this was different. Whatever it was sounded larger. Every so often, it seemed to grab onto a tree and shake it. These didn’t sound like small trees you could hear the wood creak and crack as they swayed. The motion wasn’t violent, more like the slow, heavy movement of a large tree bending in the wind.
The sounds circled around our camp as the fire continued to die down. Then, suddenly, it let out the most bizarre scream I’ve ever heard. It started as a low rumble and rose into a high pitched shriek like a woman being murdered. It was incredibly loud and deeply unsettling. The scream ended with a long, drawn out exhale, almost like a hiss, but slower and more breath like than a cat’s.
My ex, who had been drinking heavily and was exhausted after a day of kayaking, barely reacted. He opened the tent, grabbed a nearby log, and tossed it onto the fire, sending up sparks and briefly reviving the flames. He later said he heard the sound but didn’t know what it was. He quickly fell back asleep.
I hoped the renewed fire would scare whatever it was away, but when the flames died down again, the scream came back. It happened two more times. After that, everything went quiet. I didn’t hear the trees move again, and I couldn’t tell if it had come closer or moved away.
I tried to wake him a couple of times, but he only grunted and stayed asleep. I was left lying there, shaken. The scream felt so intense, so full of emotion, that I could feel it in my body.
For years, I searched for an explanation some animal that could make a sound like that but I never found a match. Then, sometime in the 1990s, I saw a TV segment, I believe it was on Unsolved Mysteries about a woman who reported a prowler outside her home, describing a man in what looked like a fur coat peering through her window. When police arrived, one of the officers captured a scream over the dispatch radio while calling it in.
Hearing that recording nearly brought me to tears. It was the closest thing I had ever heard to what I experienced that night, if not the exact same sound.”
Charles R
Can you find that TV segment of that unholy scream? I too heard it and very close although we were in my buddies house sleeping at 3am. We talked about it often when I visited him until his death in 2008, what the hck it coulc be. It was not until 2009 I learned what it was.