intro
1. I once led a trip to the top of Mt. Sterling in North Carolina. It's a tough climb to get to the top, and about six miles from the nearest road. I was leading a group of eight middle school kids and had one co-instructor. We were camping out on top of the mountain, and it was a beautiful night with a full moon. The kids and the other co-instructor went to bed in their tents. I chose to spend the night in a hammock that night. I was really into a book I was reading so I stayed up and read until about 10:30 PM. I turned my headlamp off to settle in for the night. Everything around me was rather bright from the moon and from the position I was in. I could see down the trail we had hiked to get to the top. I laid there enjoying the scenery and noticed something moving on the trail. Bears are common in the area so I perked up. As it got closer, I could tell it was a person. We were in the middle of nowhere and there was someone hiking up the trail with no headlamp or any gear. I was just frozen, watching this person move closer to our camp. They arrived at the top of the mountain where we were and just stopped. I watched as what appeared to be a man surveyed our camp. I really could only see the outline of him. He stood there for what seemed like 30 minutes but may have been 10. He then turned and sat down under a tree facing our camp. He was sitting up in a way that I knew he wasn't trying to sleep. He just sat there staring at our camp. I had no idea what to do. I decided to wait it out. I waited, just staring at the man while he stared at my camp. This went on until about 3:30 AM. Then, he stood up, took a moment to survey my camp a few minutes longer and then went back down the trail he came up on. I, to this day have no idea what that was all about but it freaked me out. I was paranoid that we were being followed for the rest of the trip.
2. "I'm a ranger at Yellowstone. Couple weeks ago I was exploring the Lamar Valley, about 11 miles from the nearest road and even further to the park boundary.
There, in the middle of the trail, is a perfectly severed deer head. No blood, no raggedness at the severance. Perfectly in tact.
This is weird because I have seen wolf and bear kills, and I used to find cougar kills in SD with radio tracking just after the cougar made them.
This was not any of those things. The head was completely uneaten - eyes, tongue, everything intact. Even the ravens hadn't touched it yet. No caching, no scat. Right smack in the trail, but again, no blood.
Even a human doing it made no conventional sense. It was a doe so it had no antlers, plus, why leave it in the trail?
Whole thing, even in broad daylight, gave me chills. Just an ocean of waving grass, bison calmly grazing, and a perfectly clean deer head right on the path."
3. A shed behind an abandoned house with a steel reinforced door broken off the hinges. The windows of the shed were boarded up from the outside. The only thing inside the shed was a queen size bed with shredded, partly singed white sheets.
- Deleted
4. Camping 80+ miles from any thing resembling civilization. Lying in the tent talking before falling asleep when all of the sudden a gunshot rings out no more than 100 yards away. Then hearing the sound slowly travel away. Then quiet.
5. [I saw] a human thumb nailed to a tree.
6. There was a group of teens that hadn't been heard from after their scheduled return time from a camping trip. [A coworker] and I head out in the general direction the teens had set off in. We'd been hiking for most of the day and seen nothing. We're about 35km into the woods at this point when we start noticing odd things. Sticks carved like spears stuck into the ground, weird carvings in the trees, a child's stuffed animal hanging from a noose up in a tree. This place was nowhere near any roads, it wasn't on the regular trails people would go on in the area. The really eerie thing was that everything was freshly-carved. Somebody had been there within a couple of hours of us and made these things. Mind you we're still looking for these teens. We kept on hiking and eventually made camp for the night still kind of on edge from what we had seen earlier but we settle down anyway and go to sleep. We get up with the sunrise hoping to cover more ground before it gets to hot. We pack up the gear and get ready to go when I notice a bit of shirt that had caught on a small tree and ripped along with some shoe prints. We were thinking: great maybe we're close by to the teens, when a radio call comes through. The teens had just been found 20 kilometers east of us, and they're calling everybody back. All those weird things we had seen from the day before came flooding back into my mind, and we wasted no time hiking out of those woods.
7. I am a seasonal ranger for my local forest district. The rest of the rangers say we find about one suicide a year. When we go around opening parks each day, we drive through to make sure everything is OK. In this instance, I was driving through, and had just lost sight of the road when I saw a man hanging from a tree in a clearing. He had hung himself. I called the cops and the coroner... the coroner took an hour to show up, and he was the only one with a ladder long enough to cut the guy down.... so I stared at a dead guy in a tree for an hour.
8. The scariest experience I had as a back-country park ranger in Washington State was being stalked by a cougar for a day and a half. I was hiking up an unpopular trail up to an old shelter and had that creepy 'being watched' feeling. I had seen fairly fresh cougar scratches and scats along the trail but that's pretty common up here so I wasn't worried at all. That night I camped at the shelter, which only had three walls and a roof. I felt uneasy all night and hardly slept. At one point (chiding myself for being paranoid) I arranged my emergency foil tarp around my sleeping bag so at least I could hopefully hear something if it approached me as I slept. The next day I found FRESH scat and scratches on the trail I had hiked in on. About a mile past the shelter I found a mostly-eaten deer in some dense brush off the trail. Cougars often keep kills stashes throughout their territory for later snacking. Now a cougar won't usually tangle with a human, but here I am a five foot tall, 100 pound sack of flesh and bones at least 13 miles out from any other humans. I decided to cut short my three-day trip, and hot-footed it out of there. The last two hours of hiking through dusk in a dense forest was the most hair-raising hike I've ever had. I didn't know I was capable of being that hyper-vigilant.
9. Our park lets kids from school in so they can look for animals in the forest and the streams.
One day a kid finds molars. The teeth looked like human molars, but the teacher said they were a deer's. I dismissed it and completely forgot about it.
Two days later, they found a corpse with a smashed skull and jaw in another part of the park. All its teeth were missing.
A local news paper covered it, but all they had to say was thank the spooky skeletons for good bones and teeth.
10. US Forest Service here: dog skeleton, still leashed to a tree, bullet hole in skull.
11. [I saw] the remains of a plane that had crashed into a cliff. Found out later that it had crashed a few years before and there had just never been the proper resources to remove the wreckage, but finding a place you know people have died in is weird.
12. I have been a ranger in the southern Canadian Rockies for a few years. One Sunday morning, I was doing my daily patrols, saw some smoke from afar, and thought I would check it out. When I arrived on the scene, there was a group of people half-naked (only sexual parts exposed), dressed up as animals all curled up in a ball passed out on the ground. Probably one of the weirdest things I have come across.
13. I was surveying a remote restoration site near an old trail and I heard someone walking up a nearby path. All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, so I grabbed all my stuff and started casually walking down the trail like I belonged there. I turned the corner and there was a shirtless guy swinging a crowbar around in circles, and when he saw me he started yelling, 'I'VE GOT A CROWBAR! I'VE GOT A CROWBAR!' I think I nodded at him, squeaked something like, 'Nice crowbar,' and then ran the mile or so back to my truck.
14. I do surveying in pretty remote areas. Weirdest thing I saw was a 70 year old squatter who lived out in the desert, just him and his dog. He drove his quad into town once a week for water, otherwise he just lives in his trailer all day. I don't know what he does for food or entertainment. Really nice guy though. He offered to help us out with our survey any way that he could.
15. For several years I worked out in the forests of a country that experienced a genocide in the not-incredibly-distant past. Several times I found skulls. Once I wasn't watching where I was going and stumbled on something soft. I looked down and it looked like a very old sweater had been lying there forever. I poked it with my foot and dug around in the vegetation a bit, and sure enough. Most of the skeleton was gone, but it was clear there were bones inside the sweater. Somehow that freaked me out more than the skulls.
16. I worked for a summer camp a while ago that was out in the wilderness.Have you ever heard a rabbit dying? It sounds like a screaming and crying baby. That mixed with darkness and being alone is terrifying.
17. I'm doing some subcontracting work marking borders for the state of Massachusetts, meaning I walk around all day blazing and painting trees. I was working today in a wildlife management area which has one road going through it, and as I crossed it, I encountered a hiker.
Now this guy seemed pretty normal, but from his perspective, a 6 foot tall 180 lb man just came crashing out of the woods wearing no shirt, covered in paint, holding an axe. He commented that my axe was "a serious piece of equipment", and without thinking, I responded "yeah gotta watch out or it can cut you real easy". He looked completely terrified, muttered a goodbye, and took at brisk walk while checking back over his shoulder every few seconds.
18. I was working with endangered shorebirds one summer and living on a remote island off of Cape Cod. One 12 hour day of monitoring, I plopped down in some sand to take a nap and noticed a bottle laying next to my head. It was fogged up and weathered from the sea. I usually don't think much of bottles because they're everywhere on the island, but I decided to open it thinking there might be something inside of it. Earlier that summer I found a message in a bottle from a team of people researching local currents, asking me to email them the coordinates I found it at.
Sure enough, this one had a message in it.
I pulled out a wet, folded piece of paper from the bottle and carefully unfolded it. It immediately began to tear apart in the wind, but I kept it pieced together just well enough to read it. It was from a woman named Mama Lu. She addressed it to the universe, asking to become cancer free, and hoping for a sign of remission during her doctors appointment that was scheduled 2 days after she wrote the letter. It was one of the saddest and most beautiful things I've ever read. A letter to the universe, and a glimpse into the soul of a person who is desperate to grasp on to life as she knows it, sitting in my unlikely hands.
Here's a picture of the letter:
19. I was mapping one summer (ex-geologist) on the tundra in northern Quebec (Nunavik) approximately 150-200 km from the nearest town. I mean, the middle of nowhere - no one was there. No cabins, no ATV routes, nothing.
We were walking along when my field partner flipped a rock with his foot (just a random rock of millions - tons of glacial float up there) when a piece of paper flies up from underneath it caught by the breeze. He turns to me and we both go, what the heck? because there should be NO paper just randomly there.
I track down the paper and find that it's folded. I open it up and see that it's a note with the words, "Je t'aime" on it with a drawn heart. Upon seeing this, I literally got chills up and down my spine, because the improbability of it floating all that way, being undamaged by the rain or the myriad of lakes, and then us finding it... I am not a religious or superstitious man, but it felt like the universe or some higher power just reached out and poked me in the chest.
Niskanen20420. Honest to goodness, I once encountered a bear orgy. It was deep in Rocky Mountain National park about 15 years ago. I was hiking and I came across 5 or 6 black bears just going to town on each other. No one back at the station ever believed me and this was before I had a phone that could take pictures or video. Never seen anything like that since.
21. From my experience, which is admittedly lacking (only been in the profession for a year) the most startling parts of the wilderness are not the wildlife you run into, but the people.
We were out on a spike trip once and we were hiking a rarely used trail (more like a goat path) and there was some rustling off in the woods. Usually we have a Ranger with us who carries a weapon, but we try to avoid confrontation. We assumed it was a deer or at worst, a bear, but when we got close enough to see, it was two men going at it. They hiked over 10miles into the woods and then had sex no more than 15 feet from the only trail. It was startling.
22. Not my own story but this was told to me by a friend who lives near Tucson, AZ.
Apparently he and his friends were out in the desert one night (I can't remember if they were camping overnight or just out late), when they kind of got separated. There were three of them and the one I know (I'll call him Joe though that's not his name) was calling for the other two when he spies someone who was crouching near the ground nearby suddenly stand up in the moonlight. This was around eight yards away from him. He thought it was one of his friends and started to move towards it, when he hears his actual buddies respond to his calls behind him.
He just very slowly backed away and ran for it.
Teachers are meant to impart knowledge to the next generation, but they have to get the kids to pay attention first.
Not an easy task.
So many, too many schools are plagued by kids who have no self-control.
Teachers end up playing referee, counselor, and parent in addition to their teaching role.
All of those additional hats don't come with any additional pay.
It's no wonder we're in a teacher shortage.
Redditor _Planet_Mars_ wanted the teachers out there to share some rough student stories, so they asked:
"Teachers, what is the worst thing you've seen a student do?"
I once saw a kid drive their car into the school office.
They were drunk.
Thankfully no one was injured.
POP!
"The was a loud pop and a flash in the back corner of the classroom. I asked the student sitting there what happened. She said it was firecrackers. I sent her to the office. While she was still in the office, I realized the electrical outlets in the room didn’t work. At that point, another student fessed up that the student sent to the office had put a pair of scissors in the outlet. I’m not sure why that student thought it was better to lie and claim she was doing fireworks inside the school?"
mynamelessname
Pain
"When I was teaching preschool, I had a little girl, between 3-4, walk up to another girl who was sitting on the rug reading a book, grab her by the hair and slam her head into the wall. They hadn’t been interacting in any way prior. When I asked her why she did it, she said she 'wanted her to know it hurts.'"
No-Doubt-8748
That Kid
"A different type of bad than most of these."
"I was a teacher at a poor inner-city school. I had a lot of wonderful students but some difficult ones. One was the worst — bright but was always sleeping through class and acting up and never doing homework. I lived about 30 minutes away. One night, I stopped by the local Wawa after a night out with friends. Was at least 11:30 pm and I was already dreading the early morning drive to school. And who should be checking me out but my own 'problem' student."
"He was working late to make money for his family and then getting home at 1:00 am or later before heading into school on 4-5 hours of sleep. He was a smart kid. Really smart. I hope things worked out for him but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d been allowed to have a childhood and focus on his education."
Low_Cartographer2944
Blame the Heat
Sweating James Mcavoy GIFGiphy"It gets very hot here in the warmer months and so the school put out those big containers for water for everyone. Well, one student was caught peeing into a bag and dumping it into the containers."
huzzahserrah
Some kids really need some deeper therapy.
Peeing in bags? Seriously?!
From Beneath
"My wife is an elementary teacher and has a kid this year that likes to slip under their desk and lick toes (we live in a warm state) and they all think he will grow up to be a creeper."
CherryManhattan
BOOM
"This was the worst thing I know of that happened at my high school."
"Someone brought a blasting cap to school (OK, that's a bit dumb), and flushed it down the toilet (that's REALLY dumb). Then told a teacher about it, because maybe it wasn't such a good idea (their best idea that day, really)."
"Wound up with that restroom being taken out of service while the fire department x-rayed the plumbing to find and remove the (admittedly tiny) explosive. Took several weeks before it was back in service."
gogstars
Sad
"My favorite teacher in high school was a very kind a lenient man. Do your work, be respectful, and follow the major school rules and you and him would be cool. The one thing that would seem minor, but that he was very strict about was taking any medication in any way shape, or form in his classroom."
"One day, I needed to take some Advil for cramps and asked to take it. He said I needed to go to the nurse for permission. I ended up asking him why he was so strict about it. it turns out, he had a student pass out in class one day at his former school. He tried to wake her up and called the nurse, but she wouldn't wake up. They called 911 and by the time they got there, she had died of an OD on narcotics she took in the bathroom that she had hidden in a Tylenol bottle. I don't know how he went back to teaching after that."
musical-nerd24601
Painful
Moving Season 2 GIF by Paramount+Giphy"Saw a 4-year-old purposely push a piece of furniture over onto another 4-year-old at preschool. It actually really hurt the other kid, and her parents took the school to court."
MPD1987
Kids are brutal.
No wonder people home school.
Buying a home is a daunting task, but it comes with the comfort of finally having a place to call your own after the lengthy process of purchasing.
One of the things new homeowners look forward to is renovating certain areas of their newly acquired domicile.
However, embarking on this next phase of making a home their own can come with some surprises.
For example, doing a gut reno in the basement or tearing down a non-load-bearing wall can unearth unusual relics left from the previous homeowner.
These discoveries can either be treasures, or something very unpleasant.
Curious to hear from new homeonwers, Redditor Oblivious_Dude14 asked:
"People who bought a house. What is the weirdest thing you have found left by the previous owner?"
These will spark curiosity about former occupants.
Hidden Message
"First time I took a hot shower in our new home. The steam covered the mirror, only to reveal the phrase 'HELLO, I SEE YOU' in large finger drawn writing."
"It freaked me out for a second, but made me laugh soon after that."
"It was such an inconspicuous yet obvious thing to leave for the new homeowner (me)."
– Individual-Common-89
A Special Request
"It's not really weird but I think it's kind of a nice story."
"One of the kids' rooms has a shelf going all around the top edge, and when my kid was putting stuff up there they found a letter from the previous kid. The letter welcomed them to the room etc and asked them to take special care of a rose bush in the front yard that was their special rose bush. My kid thought it was really cool to have that connection with the previous kid."
– catsaway9
Instructions
"Not really weird but they left a typed out and printed note about the house and how to take care of it. Detailing all the plant life in the backyard and how to prep for the winter. Described how to take care of the hot tub and gave random tid bits about the electrical."
"They were good people lol."
– pet_zulrah
Theses secret chambers piqued Redditors' curiosity.
Secret Dwelling
"Not my house, but the school my friend worked at."
"A pipe had leaked and ruined a wall in the building, one of the oldest schools in the city. It was a beautiful property. Anyways the pipe leaked so they pulled down the ruined wall and behind the wall found a door."
"A fully furnished apartment was there. Had a coal burning stove to heat it. Early 1900s appliances and decor. It was for the caretaker of the school."
– Used-Stress
Antique Showroom
"My ex-wife's family knocked down a wall in a 400-year-old house in Cornwall, and found a perfectly intact bedroom from the 1800s, still with all the personal effects where they had been left."
"Nobody knows why it was boarded up, or why things weren't taken out of it."
"Oh, and that house always appears in the guides for the most haunted locations in Cornwall, if you believe that kind of stuff."
– ledow
A Medieval Theme
"A basement room that was fully decked out as a 'dungeon.' Faux stone walls, a stocks (like where you lock your head and hands in ala ye olde England), candle scones on the walls, a metal-barred cage in the corner from floor to ceiling. Oh and the closet had a load of toys, some normal, some....not so typical."
– DisIsDaeWae
These Redditors got a glimpse into past lives.
Family Treasure
"Before I met her, my wife got a call from someone she worked with saying they'd just bought an old house and in the city, and in it was a steamer trunk with her family name (not a common one) carved into the woodwork on one end."
"As it turns out, it was the trunk that her great grandfather used when he came over from Germany, and it made the trip to my wife's hometown when he met her great grandmother on a visit, and subsequently moved to her city to marry her. We now have it and it's full of family portraits and albums."
– LateralThinkerer
Vintage Trickster
"My first house purchase in 2005 - bought an old farmhouse that was built in 1923. The basement was FILLED with crap - we told them they needed to clean it all out before closing, but they didn't do it. The realtor asked if we wanted to postpone closing, and we decided no - some of the stuff looked interesting enough. Maybe it will be worthwhile to go through."
"Most of it was just junk. Then, about half way through (we were working our way from one end of the basement to the other, because you could barely walk through), I went to pick up what I thought was a small box, only to quickly realize it weighed at least 75 pounds. Upon further inspection, it wasn't a box, but a wooden square, 4' wide and about 12'x12', with two thin masonite plywood covers on each side. On one edge were two bolts with wires coming off that had been cut."
"Very strange - had no idea what it was, but thought it was interesting. So I put it aside and we kept going. At the very back of the basement once we cleared everything else out, was a rickety gray cabinet, built into the house. Inside, were numerous strange small tools, vials of mercury, vials of a strange powder, and thousands - literally thousands - of dice blanks. Some actual dice, but mostly blanks without the dots. they were all in little boxes labeled 'dice blanks'. Also very strange..."
"Not too long after that, I met a guy and upon learning my address, he said 'can I come over?My best friend grew up in that house'. He came by, and proceeded to tell me stories for an hour and a half about his childhood best friends eccentric father: Someone who was a part of the 'Dixieland Mafia' in the 60s and 70s, and who made a living traveling around the US as a traveling gambler. The enormously heavy box was an electro-magnet. And the dice blanks were for him to make his own loaded dice with a little bit of metal powder under the inlaid dot, so he could set up his own table with the the electromagnet underneath, and turn it on when he wanted to persuade the dice. He told me many other stories, including that there was 'no doubt in his mind that he had killed someone'. Pretty fascinating."
– GIjokinaround
A Soldier's Story
"A diary of an American soldier in WW-II, South Pacific Theater. Found it above a door when remodeling 20+ years ago. My wife and I tried everything we could think of to find a descendant, but to no avail."
"UPDATE: I just posted photos of it with the person's ID info on r/WorldWar2."
"Last Update: Thanks to all the help from this community, and those at r/worldwar2, this diary is now in the hands of its writer's son who came to my office this morning to retrieve it. I am so thrilled to have been able to facilitate this!"
– Factsaretheonlytruth
These folks really hit the jackpot.
Forgotten Stash
"$1200 in cash above the door on the inside the closet. I found it while painting."
– whymetoo
They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To
"A glass bowl. It was kind of pretty, with horizontal blue stripes."
"We kept fruit in it. We thought about dropping it off at the local charity shop, but never got around to it."
"Then one day I was at an antique fair and I saw for sale glass bowls that looked almost identical to ours. I went home to get my bowl and brought it to be assessed."
"Turns out it was a vintage Orrefors crystal bowl. The assessor valued it at around $800."
"We no longer keep fruit in it."
– khendron
When my great aunt passed away, our family went over to her and her husband's home in Pomona, CA to clear it out in preparation to sell.
They emigrated from Japan in the late 1930s and brought with them many decorative figurines, sculptures, and wooden carvings from the homeland.
One of the pieces was a kabuki doll on a wooden base. As we were placing the item in a box, a tiny envelope that had been taped underneath the doll's base came loose.
I opened it and found what looked like instructions for something. I kick myself to this day that I didn't keep the letter and never bothered asking my parents what the note said as we were frantically trying to empty the house.
But man, my imagination ran wild. Was it a treasure map? Who knows. I still wonder to this day what the note said and tossing it aside remains one of my life's greatest regrets.