For those just joining us, read this for the backstory: [1] http://creepycampingvt.blogspot.com
P.S. i just checked one of my older posts and see its the first one to reach over 100 upvotes in this subreddit. thanks guys, and i really hope this community continues to grow as it has.
Anyways, here we go.
Sorry this is so late. I've been pretty sick the last few weeks, but i'll get to that. I'll have to post videos and pictures later. i haven't quite found the will to go through them yet. but i know you are all rabid for the story so i'll just get to that now.
Method: since terrain is so rough at parts and there are no paths we thought the best way to find whatever it is we were looking for was to hike for a few hours, set up camp when we found an area flat enough, then explore the surrounding area. We used tim’s hiking gps to leave breadcumbs back to our camp site when we were off exploring. We tried not to be out of yelling distance to eachother.
FRIDAY: its me, and three of my friends, Mo, Brendan, and Tim. we take off around noon. our first destination is the original camping spot. the hike is only about 45 minutes but through rough terrain (you can see it in one of my older videos.) we set up camp, have a snack, and begin exploring. We found a few of those stick shrine structures. If they were planned out to be in some sort of formation or path, it was lost on me. we’d find a few of the structures, then a row of sticks that would terminate at a tree or just stop completely. They seemed to be just randomly placed. I'm a little surpised about how close they were to the camping site, and how we didnt stumble upon them the first time we camped there. You can see these structures in an older video, not the same ones though but similiar.
After a few hours of walking around, goofing off, and trying to have a good time while documenting everything, we head back to camp. The sun is starting to set and so we cook dinner, break out the cards, and the radio. No weird signal though. We have a little fire but don’t stay up too late. We have to have enough energy for tomorrow’s hike, which will be much longer than what we did today. we put out the fire and turn in.
Don’t ask me what time it was, because I have no idea. It could have been anywhere between midnight and 3 am. We all were woken up by the scream and it was damn close. We talk to each other from our tents but were too afraid to get out. Finally, we agree to all get out at once and take a look around. We climb out and to our surprise, the fire is going. Now it is possible we didn’t put it out completely from earlier, but I swear we knocked it down and threw a pile of dirt of it and stirred it up to make sure we didn’t see any ambers or coals. (we didn’t use water as we had to conserve as much as we could for the four days.) so after we calm down a bit I remember to grab my camera and film a bit. I walk out into the woods trying to find tracks but it was too dark so i just went back to camp. I didn't think to check for the radio signal. We talk each other down and head back to our tents.
SATURDAY: we woke up pretty late, around 1030 or so. We were exhausted from a not-so-good-night’s sleep the night before. First thing I did was look around for tracks. I didn’t see any (other than what could have just been our own tracks in the leaves). However, in my search I did find bone fragments. Much like the ones I found all that time ago. I didn’t bother taking pictures though. You’ve seen them in the earlier videos and I didn’t feel like digging out my camera. We ate breakfast, made jokes, raised our morale a little bit, and packed up. The second day was pretty wet, gloomy, and cold. This actually worked to our advantage as we didn’t need nearly as much water as we wouldn’t sweat as much. It is a huge struggle to balance water needs vs packweight. Water is the heaviest thing you can carry and we needed a lot as I don’t recall any reliable streams on the mountain.
Anyways, with our packs on and our bellies relatively full, we head in the direction of the stick shrines. Walking through them was very eerie and we were all quiet (though you tend not to talk much when carrying 65 lbs on your back trekking through the woods). We found an area that had 3-4 shrines relatively close together. We decided to take a break so I could snap some pictures and examine them a little bit. I found one of those stick paths leading to a tree. Now that we had more sunshine (although still filtered through some clouds) I could see the significance of the tree. I must have missed this in my earlier video, but on the tree there were letter carved. You guessed it: I.A.O..
Well that was enough for me. I put the camera away and we pick up our packs and take off. We decided to try to keep going up, as the camping spot we were originally at was only about 3 quarters of the way up the mountain. Climbing was a bitch with the packs, and I think I went through a good amount of water doing it. We started to worry about running out of water before the trip was over. I had brought some iodine water purifying pills in case we came across any streams, but despite it being cold, damp, and dreary, there was no running water anywhere. Mostly just mud and more mud.
A few more hours later we reached the peak. There were no good lookouts though and no good places to set up camp, so after having a snack at the top, we made our way down the other side to find some flat area and set up camp. It must have been about 5 when we were all settled in again. It amazing how exhausted you can get from walking around all day, not to mention the tension in the air from fear of what we got ourselves into. Our friend Mo wasn’t feeling well. He is a little less in shape than the rest of us. He smoke cigarettes almost every time we stop and had a bit of trouble keeping up with us. No matter though, we figured, we had set up camp and the hard work for the day was over. He decided to take a nap while the rest of us dug a fire pit and found firewood.
Around 7 we had a fire going and mo had just woken from his nap. He was complaining that his head felt awful and he looked extremely pale. He told us he had some really fucked up dreams, but didn’t really elaborate on them when pressed. I guess he couldn’t remember them well enough to tell us or just couldn’t describe them. Happens to the best of us I suppose. Anyways, I brought some bayer pain relief as I was certain to get sore from carrying a pack all day. I offered him some but he refused. He didn’t think it would do much for the headache. Instead we all just realized how hungry we were and decided to cook our dinner.
OK last bit here to wrap it up, i'll push through to the end.
We cook up our dinner, then its time to go explore. mo isnt feeling well so he stayed behind. tim opted to stay with him so he doesnt have to be on his own. Brendan and I go out exploring. its about 830 and the sun is starting to set so we high tail it back to the top of the mountain and start our search there. we found the place where we stopped for snacks and split off and go in opposite directions to cover the ground we didnt when we passed through. so im walking along looks for anything that might be of interest and low and behold there are some more stick stuck in the ground. they arent really shrines as i decribed before, but they dont seem like paths either. they are just randomly stuck everywhere. i begin looking at the tree for the IAO carving i saw earlier and find some, along with some other weird markings. matching them up to the previous pictures from the sstv signal they look like they are written in cherokee. i believe it is the word for woman. i managed to get a shot of it but then my camera was starting to have battery issues.
after trying to get pictures of the carvings i noticed something shiny sticking out through the leaves. i walk over and move it aside and its a big chuck of sheet metal. if i had to wager a guess id say it came from the crash site. it looked like it had been in some extreme heat and was twisted. i move around the leaves some more and find a cable buried in the ground. i pull on it and see that it goes toward one of the trees with a carving on it. i follow the cable up with my eyes and see above me in the branches a fucking antenna. bingo. as i look around more i see some others too. unfortunately, tim has the radio in his pack so i can't try and listen to it now. the but antennas all seem small and wired together haphazardly. probably why we could only get the signal intermittently.
at this point im really excited and start shouting for brendan to come over and see what i found. i yell and yell for him but i donnt hear anything but my echo coming back. at this point the sun is going behind the hills so i start walking back to where we split up. i get there and start yelling my ass off for him. then i hear a rustling in the woods, pretty loud and coming towards me. i yell 'hello?' and i see bbrendan running up the hill towards me and he just says, 'dude, fucking run!'
i have no idea why but i donnt really care, i already had adrenaline pumping through my body from my creepy discovery, so we just take off in the direction back to camp. i try asking him what he saw while chasing after him but he's just says to keep runnning. im more than a little freaked out at this point.
so there we are running away from something, im not sure what, and i keep looking back to see if anything is chasing us and there isnt. i see the camp fire up ahead and tim and mo huddled around it. so we run up and im breathing so hard i didnt even notice but they were listening to the radio signal. they barely even gave us a look when we arrived. whatever was on the radio had their full attention. i ask brendan again why we were running and he said he saw something massive in the woods and it looked right at him. i ask if it was a moose, but i already knew that it wasnt. he said it was crouched down when he saw it, but it rose up in this kind of amorphious way and looked at him. he said it was featureless except for some really long wirey limbs sticking out from a blob.
i call bullshit and tell him that he was an ass for making us run because i found where the signal was coming from. both mo and tim look at me when i say this and tell me to shut up so i can hear what is being played back. it was a song. i dont know what song but it was a song that sounded like it was being played from a music box, followed by some numbers being read over what im assuming is the sstv signal again. i get out my camera to record it, but the battery keeps dying so i only could capture little bits of it.
we listen for a bit and decide what were going to do. the next day we planned to go up to the antennas try and find where the other end of the cable leads. brendan insists he isnt going, and he'll stay at the campsite with mo. mo is looking more and more like death. he drank all of his water so we give him some of ours. we figure that if we find the source tomorrow we wont have to stay another night anyways and can just go home. we wouldnt need to ration water anymore.
night comes, we all go to bed. im sound asleep when i hear voices outside my tent. its brendan and tim. apparently they heard something that i slept through and were outside investigating it. i get out from my tent and ask them whats up. apparently, at some point, brendan got up to take a piss and saw something again. it darted off into the woods and made a quacking sound. my guess: it was a duck. but i guess the sound woke tim up and he came out to see what was up. brendan is freaking out i guess because of what he saw earlier and we're bothing trying to calm him down. but then we start hearing thigns too. coming from the peak we hear what sounds like footsteps in the leaves. we all get real quiet to listen but they just stop. i tell tim to get his radio. he grabs it, turns it on and we hear the signal again. he turns it down low so we can still hear if whatever is in the woods is still moving. i grab my camera to try and film whatever happens. this is when the signal goes dead. not static, just, dead. there is complete silence annd none of us are moving and talking, just waiting to hear the footsteps again. we just stood motionless for what seemed like forever when all of a sudden a scream rips through the air and we all nearly shat ourselves.
none of us move. none of us say a word. i look behind me and mo is sticking his head out from his tent. he also knows not to make a sound. we tell him to get out here and he slowly exits.
the nice thing about mo is he brought knives. big ones. he pulled out two, and hands one to brendan. we all kind of huddle together and look out in the woods trying to see something, anything. nothing happens. we feel a little braver so i started throwing sticks and pine cones in the direction we heard the footsteps. im hoping to scare whatever it is out so we can rest easy when we find out its a squirrel or something. but nothing happens. we eventually all go back to our tents and try to sleep.
not happening. after what seemed like 2 hours but was probably only one, another scream. closer. we all get out of our tents again. obviously none of us are sleeping tonite. we are all scared shitless. mo looks like he's going to die any second. so we made a decision. we're going home. right now. we pack up our shit quickly, while glancing at the woods every onnce in a while to make sure nothingn is coming for us. it must have taken us 45 minutes to get everything together in the dark. we only had our flash lights to see. we split up most of mo's stuff into our own packs so he wouldnt have to carry much himself. this would slow us down and hopefully speed him up so we could all keep the same pace. there was no leaving the pack at this point.
after we're all packed up its time to go, the only problem is that we have to go back the way we came. back over the peak and do it in the dark. im in front, followed by tim, mo, and brendan in the back. we walk and walk, not saying a word. we try to soften our footsteps so we can hear whats out there, but its not much help. we pass the peak, this is the scariest part to me because this is where brendann saw the thing and i found the antennas. its kind of ground zero i guess. i pretty much try to hold my breath through the peak, which was impossible when youre hiking. we start descending again, we have maybe 3 hours of walking before we are back home. luckily its downhill and we can go fast.
then, brendan tells us all to stop. we do, and we immediately hear it on both sides of us. there is something darting around in the woods. we look for a bit but can only catch glimpses of whatever it was darting between the trees. for my own sanity im saying it was a fox or something. i tell them there isnt anything we can do but keep going. mo has his knife out again, brendan is clutching his too. we pick up the pace and within ann hour we are back at the first camping site. this means its only about 45 minutes back to tims house. we have a brief discussion on whether or not to stay here or just go home and be done with it. i voted stay. everyone else voted go. so we went. as we were walking back we heard the scream again, bbut this time it sounded far away again. i could see where the tree line ended by this point. no one was even scared by it, or if they were they didnt say anything. we were all just so tired. we made it back and all passed out in tim's living room. it was about 430 by this point. the sky was beginning to lighten up and the birds were starting to shirp. we slept until 1 in the afternoon. when we woke up, we were all sick. i still ahve a bit of a lingering cough, but its subsiding finally.
so thats the story. no more posts from me. maybe some other redditor in the area may want to try their luck at it, but im not going to post anymore about it. again, i swear to you all that everything ive said is real. i love this community and the support ive gotten throughout the ordeal. but honestly, i dont think i'll ever know the truth about what is happening with the radio signals, or what is screaming, or building stick shrines. so if youre disappointed by this story, i understand. i am too. but its gone on for long enough and its pretty clear that there wont be any resolution. i hope you enjoyed the ride. i did, and its something i'll never forget for as long as i live. i still wont say for sure that im a believer in the supernatural now. but i think i can at least accept i won't always find and explanation for everything in life. anyways, i hope you enjoyed my posts. ill try and get pictures and video up soon if you want them. take care.
-the creepy vt camper
