"I stepped on what I thought was a small rock but it turned out to be weird and gelatinous. I've also seen tombstones in the woods."

his_eminence56

You just suprised it. Rocks are soft and squishy, they just tense up when you touch them! /s

"I was hiking through the remnants..."

"I was hiking through the remnants of a remote, long-abandoned town and the surrounding area. To get to as far into the woods as I was, you had to cross fallen trees over a creek three times. I had just crossed the third "bridge" and was about five miles in and something blue caught my eye just ahead of me."

"There was a man, in his sixties at least, wearing blue satin pajamas, sitting in a tree. The closer I got to him the louder he laughed; it wasn't a maniacal laugh, but it set off all the alarms in my head nevertheless. He also wasn't wearing any shoes and looked well-groomed/cleaned."

"I gave him a friendly nod as I passed and he just kept laughing. Then it stopped. I turned and he was gone. There was no branch cracking, plants rustling, nothing... He was just gone."

"Still rubs me the wrong way. The area I was in was a pretty rough hike, very secluded. Not very many people venture as deep as I was that day. No idea what was going on there."

mrwitch

“Over the Third Bridge” would be a great title for a spooky book or movie.

"Zeus seemed to lose track of the thing..."

"About twenty years ago my wife and our two children (twins, they were about one year old at the time) moved into a house that sat right on the edge of about 40 acres of heavily wooded land in Kentucky. We had a dog. He was a good dog and a great security system. We named him Zeus."

"This dog was a tank. He was a stray. A mutt of some kind, and I don't know what breeds he was made up of, but he was huge. My neighbor told me once that he saw Zeus get hit by a car on the nearby highway and Zeus just walked away like nothing happened. Not a scratch on him."

"Anyway, Zeus stayed outside most of the time and, while he wasn't much of a barker, on some nights he would occasionally bark at the local nocturnal wildlife in the nearby woods."

"One night however Zeus started barking incessantly probably around 11:00 PM. I tried to ignore it for a while, hoping he would stop, but he just would not stop barking. He had a very loud bark and I was afraid he would wake the kids, so I grabbed a flashlight and went outside to see what was going on."

"I found him out back at the edge of our small vegetable garden, barking at the woods. I could tell he was on edge and he barely acknowledged my presence when I stood beside him. He just kept barking. I pointed the beam of my flashlight at the tree line, expecting to see the eyes of a raccoon or a possum or maybe a rabid coyote (healthy coyotes usually stayed well away from the area), but there was nothing."

"Just trees and darkness. I gave old Zeus a good pat and a scratch and this seemed to soothe him for a moment, but as soon as I stopped petting him he immediately started barking at the trees again. I realized the only way to calm him down would be to take him into the woods so he could examine whatever it was that was freaking him out."

"I walked to the head of a nearby trail that cut into the woods and Zeus followed. He seemed happy to be going. He and I had walked that trail many times and he usually stayed right by my side. But on that night, we had only made it a hundred meters or so into the woods when Zeus bolted into the trees to the left side of the trail."

"I called for him, but he ignored me. I could hear him making his way quickly through the thick underbrush, moving away from me. I called for him until he had moved so far away that I couldn't hear him anymore. Sh*t, I thought. I'm going to have to go in after him."

"Bushwhacking in the middle of the night sounded like an awful idea, so I continued down the trail looking for a break in the underbrush where I could pick my way through in the dog's direction."

"A couple of minutes later I stopped walking when I heard something crashing through the woods, coming toward me. The sound seemed to be coming from the general area where I thought Zeus would have been, and it sounded like him, so I assumed he had finished his investigation and was coming back to me."

"The source of the sound grew closer and closer until it was near enough for me to predict where Zeus would reach the trail, which was a spot about 5 meters ahead of me. I focused my light there, but something else came out of the woods instead."

"It came out right where I thought it would and my flashlight afforded me a good look at it, but it's difficult for me to explain what it looked like. It was just a thing. If I had to describe its color, I suppose I would say it was gray, but that's not exactly right."

"I'd estimate it was a little less than a meter in length, but I could see no head, no legs, no tail, no appendages of any kind. Just a kind of amorphous, grayish, seemingly opaque thing. The thing moved across the trail in front of me from left to right, but it never touched the ground."

"It was just kind of gliding through the air at about waist height. Whatever it was disappeared into the woods on the right side of the trail and a moment later Zeus burst onto the path from my left and he followed it. I realized then that the crashing sound I had been hearing seconds before had been the dog and that the gray thing hadn't been making any sound at all as it moved."

"Zeus seemed to lose track of the thing soon after he crossed the path and he came back to me. Afterward, he and I went back home and we never spoke of the incident again."

Old_Crawdad

What a crazy experience! I think it will always be a mystery.

"Neat as a pin..."

"Fully decorated Xmas tree. Middle of summer. Neat as a pin it was, as if it had just been finished. Who ever did it came back at some point and cleaned it up, because it wasn't there next I did that trail a week or so later."

OldWomanintheWoods

This one’s not that uncommon actually. Lots of folks will decorate a tree in remembrance of someone out in the woods. Sucks when they don’t clean them up though.

"It's an interesting..."

"In Japan. A hotel was abandoned before it was ever finished being built. It only became a cement skeleton, about 5 stories high. It was left that way to eventually mold back into the forest around it."

It’s an interesting small building to explore. There are halls that are unlevel to the point of hitting your head on the ceiling (think: Willy Wonka)."

"There are stairwells that lead to nothing and one that leads to an unintentional hole in a cement wall. And on the top floor (but “inside” - as in, under the “roof”), is an old car - all smashed up - with seemingly no reason or method to have been up there."

[deleted]

This reminds me of those old abandoned amusement parks that pretty much exist to destroy me mentally.

"I once walked..."

"I once walked through the undergrowth (i.e. off the trail) with my then-girlfriend when we came across this spot where a few empty plastic bags were lying on the ground (strange because the woods are otherwise super clean), a pair of gloves and, most confusingly, the official ID card (= passport) of a young woman."

Minister_of_Joy

I would freak out and call the cops. That sounds like a murder scene.

"Many plastic bags..."

"Many plastic bags with nothing really in them but random odd things tied to trees. Sure, it could have been a homeless person but us kids att (like 12+) of us lived in those small woods behind the church every single day. We never saw anyone like that, ever. Passing through I guess, but why so many bags...still wonder."

WiseOwlBear

Do we want to know what was in them? Probably not.

"When I was a teenager..."

"When I was a teenager, I worked at a fireworks stand that was run by my friend's family. It was in a rural area: they owned a few acres of land, had the fireworks tent at the front of the property and the house towards the back, but no lights in between. My friend's mother would prepare dinner for all the workers and we'd take turns going back to the house for dinner."

"One night, I was going to the house for dinner by myself. I felt something on my arm. I thought a bug might have landed on me, but it was really dark so I couldn't see anything. I stopped walking for a second. Then I started hearing this low, raspy breathing right next to me."

"There weren't any people around me and it didn't sound anything like a bug. It was like a slow, asthmatic wheeze."

"I started getting really freaked out. I reached my hand down to my arm and felt... something larger than I expected. I furiously rubbed my hands all across my body to try and dislodge whatever this thing was, then ran as fast as I could to the house. When I finally got to the safety of the house, I could see a small red mark on my arm, but that was it."

"To this day, it's probably the most freaked out I've ever been."

[deleted]

Chills reading this! Nooo thank you!

"Several very large holes..."

"Really big holes. Several very large holes, fairly close to each other, that seem to serve no purpose. Ten feet wide, deep enough that if you jumped in you’d have to have help getting out. Was someone preparing to bury a bunch of people? Was someone punishing their kid by making them dig holes? Did they hear there was buried treasure out there?"

"We’ve never figured it out."

theyarnilama

How far apart? How neat were the holes? In a plantation or natural wood? Accessible by a small excavator?

"I once saw a huge pile of cat and dog skulls and bones about 100m from my cabin so we sold the cabin as soon as we could. It was creepy."

[deleted]

This definitely sounds like the beginning of a horror film. Did the ghosts follow you? Please report back.

"There's a small patch..."

"There's a small patch of woods where I live. You could walk across it in less than an hour. It's entirely safe and has marked trails. People somehow manage to get lost in there and I can't explain that."

ThadisJones

Did they stumble across the bounds of time and space? That might explain it. But you might be underestimating how many people lack a sense of direction.

None of this makes you want to go out into the woods, huh? Yeah, we thought so. We'll pass the next time we get an offer to go camping somewhere.

Have some stories of your own? Feel free to tell us more in the comments below!