The Background

This is where the story starts.  Originally posted to http://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/blhqk/im_going_camping_this_weekend_in_a_vt_creepy/ on 01 Apr 2010.

 

My buddy bought a house last summer. I won't say where exactly it is to protect the identity, but its in the backwoods of VT, miles from any small town even.

over the winter he would often find wildlife in his yard, deer, moose, coy dogs, etc. and he would occasionally hear the crys and howls. pretty normal stuff for vermont woods. but sometimes he heard really, really, odd things. He would tell me about them waking him and his wife up at night but i always just told him thats what he gets for living out in the woods. wildlife can be loud. he always insisted it was more than that, but i never paid attention.

that is until one night a bunch of us were out there watching a movie and we heard it. a very odd noise... and by odd i mean blood curdling inhuman... screams? i guess thats the best way to describe it. but with emphesis on inhuman, as it really didn't sound anything like a human screaming. it wasn't as high pitched and seemed to have multiple layers to it, like more than one voice. (i was a music major, im very good at picking out tones and intervals in sounds. i could tell you which notes are played and how many different ones there are in every car horn.) it sounded very, very close and you could almost feel it vibrating the house. we were all freaked out, but there was no way we were going out there to do anything about it. anyways, we just kind of ignored it and went back to the movie and ate junk food and by the time the night was over we all forgot about it and we went home.

the next day my buddy calls me up and tells me there are tracks all over his backyard. and not really tracks as much as snow just being thrown around like there was a fight or something. there were no actual footprints he could find, but he did notice somewhat of a path made out heading into the woods. so my buddy got brave and ventured into the woods a bit in his snow shoes. he didnt get too far until he started seeing blood. everywhere. he looked around a little bit and saw a dead deer, literally torn apart in the snow. it didnt look like it was really eaten or anything, just ripped apart. one leg completely missing, other just kind of dangling by flesh. gruesome stuff.

Now here's the really creepy part... and i don't know if this is just my buddy's mind going crazy or if he's playing a joke on us or what, but behind the corpse there were broken pine branches stuck straight up in the snow. like, they were deliberately placed there. almost like a shrine or a tombstone made of branches. needless to say, my buddy wised up and got the hell out of dodge and hasnt returned. But of course he didnt have his camera on him to prove it, not that he would have wanted to stick around long enough to take pictures anyways.

as winter wore on he would still hear the noises fairly often in the woods. sometimes at night, less often during the day. He's asked around and no one can really tell him what it could be, but maybe he just isnt describing it very well.

OK, fast forward to now. his property doesnt really go too far back, just a few acres, but there are literally no other houses around and there is this pretty cool mountain that we want to hike and camp out on. We are a bit concerned with whatever "animal" is out there, so we are bringing a gun. honestly though, I've camped out on a lot of the mountains around here and have never run into any problems, but the whole branch shrine thing really freaks me out as that would obviously not be done by an animal.

So tomorrow night is the night we are going to hike up there and camp out. I am bring a camera. someone else is bringing the gun (i hate guns and will avoid being around it, but we all know how to use one in case it warrents it). if anything strange happens i will do my best to capture it on camera and come back to post here. (assuming i come back, haha...)

In the mean time, any advice you guys would have for me? have you ever heard of anything like this happening? is there some crazy backwoods cult or folklore that i havent heard about? I'm going to bed now, but let me know and I'll be checking this space tomorrow during work. I'll also try to answer any questions you have.

tl;dr: something lives in the mountains where my buddies and i are camping. it kills things annd then builds branch shrines to them.

EDIT: i appreciate all the feedback guys! heres the thing, we are doing this mostly for fun. we arent going to actively look for whatever it is thats out there. so we arent going to take fancy A/V equipment or any high tech web stuff. I am bringing a small camera that I've always had good luck with in capturing things in low light.

EDIT 2: We made it back. Some pretty weird stuff happened while we were up there. I didn't really feel threatened at any point. we heard the noise. i tried to get it on tape but my batteries kept inexplicably dying, even after i replaced the battery with a fresh one. i managed to capture some of it though. also worth noting, we found some weird radio station signal. it kind of sounded like the beeps you get before the emergency broadcast system announces something on tv or the radio. There was also a new sound, it sounded kind of like a child yelling, but we passed it off as some some kind of weird bird. Lastly, we found some old bones. pretty small though. I will make a new submission for the video and also link it from here.

Here you go: http://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/bm534/back_from_the_creepy_camping_trip_in_vt_heres/