Plz I miss my reddit scary threads
Probably not the type of answer you’re looking for, but I’ve got a few that happened outdoors.
The first was when me, my brother, and some friends hiked up some train tracks to go to a ghost town at the top of a mountain near where we’d recently moved. About a 6 hour hike in. My brother was ahead of us, around 100 feet/30 meters ahead. He suddenly turns around, yells “TRAIN!” and the next thing we know, there’s a fuggin train coming around the bend. There’s only around 6-7 feet/2 meters of space between a rock wall and the tracks. We jump off the tracks and push up against the wall. With our packs on our backs (we were going to be camping for a week, so they were large packs), it felt like I could have stuck out my tongue and touched the train. The scariest part was that none of us saw if my brother had been hit. It happened too fast. The train took forever to pass, it felt like an eternity. I just knew my brother was dead, I was terrified. When the train finally passed, we rushed to where he’d been, and found that when he jumped off the tracks, he wasn’t against the wall, he was in a sort of spring/small pond, 10 feet/3 meters lower than the tracks, soaking wet. Terrified we’d been hit. First words out of his mouth were “cigarette. Now!” He was unharmed.
Next scariest thing was when me and some friends went driving in a national forest near us, and her car broke down. We walked up what we thought was the road, but turned out to be a trail. Someone started shooting at us. We ran like crazy and made it back to the car. Tbh, I don’t remember how we got her car home…
It was terrifying. Honestly one of the most scary moments of my life. I cried like a small child in front of a bunch of ex marines. Honestly, that whole trip was just cursed.
I mean…that’s a completely normal reaction. At least you all made it out alive.
Let’s see…
One time? I took my parent’s dachshund, tootsie: camping- this was when they first got her; she was maybe a few months old.
It was bear country in WI. Specifically, what’s called “primitive” camping where you can park at a state forest walk in and just set up camp.
Right by a beautiful trout stream. I was waiting for the sun to come up, enjoying some coffee, before going off to wet my line and get breakfast.
She was laying next to me, (an aggressive snuggler.) when this big ole bear comes up the stream.
When she saw it, she started trying to pick a fight. Barking.
Fortunately the bear was incredulous and possibly faintly amused. It looked at the puppy. Looked at me. Back at the puppy. It’s expression said “you realize you’re a snack, right?”
Fortunately, it moved off down the stream.
Yeah, she’s a dachshund to her core- sass, class and won’t hesitate to pick a fight with anything and then run behind you when it starts.
Doing dumb shit training in the woods for the Army. My platoon finds an area, sets up perimeter, and I post up to my spot pulling security staring out into the woods. I start digging a fox hole to chill in. It’s about 105⁰, 100% humidity and tornado season.
God Bless America.
I spend a bit over an hour digging my shallow-as-shit hole before noticing there is a lot of ticks in it. Like a lot more than I’ve ever seen. I’m so God damn tired I about knock out anyway, fuck the ticks.
Some dickhead tells me that ticks hate sulfur.
“If you rub a bunch of sulfur on your body they won’t eat you.” ??? Okay you backwoods Hick bastard, you better not be lying to me. I spend the last of my energy putting a tarp above my hole, covering the tick ground with a towel, eating some matches, praying the ticks fuck off from my sulfury sweat, and waiting for it to get dark.
It starts thunderstorming.
Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the north, but there is something viscerally WRONG about it being a hundred degrees out and having this much rain coming down. Hot air and cold rain at the same time. I go to sleep in my foxhole, expecting to be woken up in a couple hours for fireguard and having contracted Lyme disease for Uncle Sam.
Just kidding. Big ole ugly Platoon Sarge sees my genius tarp protecting me from the rain and gets jealous of my galactic brain. Just cuts the corners off the tarp with his ten dollar PX Gerber knife and smokes me for showing the “enemy” where my foxhole is. Gonna love the fist fight I’ll have with CIF later when they ask where my tarp is. I go to sleep.
That stupid red tinted Vietnam-era flashlight hits me in the eyes.
“Hey, wake up, you’re on fire guard.” Wake up, it’s pitch black, and my hole is flooded with rain water. I’ve never felt colder and closer to death. Whole body was permanently tensed and shivering. I feel numb. Extra numb in my back though. I pull out my light and check. My back is COVERED in ticks. Dozens. Maybe even a hundreds.
They’re having a king-sized FEAST from my left ass cheek to center-back.
I forget that I’m frozen solid, full fucking sprint to the least wet ground, stop drop and roll, sprint to the other guy on fireguard, and tell this man in the loudest whisper possible to just SMASH everything on my back. I guess that spot is about where your kidneys are, huh. My retarded 19 year old self didn’t really know what a kidney punch felt like, but then the fireguard homie saw the ticks and bashed my shit in with the stock of his M4.
I couldn’t even make a sound. The pain was crazy. It was probably about 2am in a forest, I am about one degree from my brain freezing solid, missing half of my blood and back flesh to this God damn tick egg colony, might have just lost one of my kidneys, and didn’t even have live ammunition to blow my brains out and end it all. And this fucking guy I barely knew was just slapping away at my bare back with his hands like I was some whore he picked up at the bar.
Anyways, turns out whatever the hell super soldier serum they shoot in your ass when you join was good enough to keep me alive that night. Definitely didn’t guard any fires like I was supposed to. I pissed blood for a bit and have a huge ugly scar on my back, but amazingly didn’t get any diseases. Even got to keep the kidney, woo.
Eating the matchstick didn’t help, -1/10 do not recommend. Kinda feel bad for giving the kid that bashed me some tick-PTSD too.
and yet, my bro does a full commitment in the wilds of Ontario - Canuck troopies would guess it in one - no tick bites. Goes camping with his 6yo kid once, BAM, lyme disease and clots. Warfarin fo’ lyfe, and the super-serum didn’t do shit.
The universe has a sick sense of humour. Glad you survived hyperthermic tick hell, but one can’t but feel like you bogarted everyone’s luck that day :-D
I was visiting some family in Transylvania, Romania and in the afternoon we decided to go for a small hike, in the mountainous woods. It was my wife and I, her local cousin and a dog. We head off into the woods on a path leading up a mountain.
At some point we passed a smallish stream and when we later returned to go back it had flooded and we couldn’t cross so had to take a detour. No phones/gps but the cousin claimed both he and the dog knew the way, so we followed them. Not long after we were in the middle of the forest in pitch black darkness as the sun went down fast, no longer following a path, but climbing up steep slopes on our hands and knees. At one point my wife put her hand down and touched something she claims was a mouse, she nearly started crying at that point. I was more worried about bears, but hoped the dog could scare them away if we met one.
Took us a few hours, but eventually we found a road and was able to follow it back. Though with Romanian traffic, I’m not sure if being lost in the woods wasn’t safer than walking a busy road at night with no lights.
Woke up one morning at summer camp with a rattlesnake curled up on my sleeping bag. I did not move until late afternoon.
Turned around on a hiking trail to see a large tusked boar a few feet away staring me down and huffing at me. All the trees around me too small or too big to climb. I backed away reeeeeeally slow and it went the other way.
Got ejected from and then trapped underneath a 12-person whitewater raft that was also stuck on rocks in a shallow section between rapids. I don’t know how I ended up back in the raft, I just remember silently saying goodbye to the world and blacking out. Then went down the same river again the next day, cause apparently I killed some brain cells the first time.
(etc)
I need more info on the rattlesnake story. Did you have your phone with you? Did you call someone to help you? What happened?
This was before the modern age of cell phones, there was one pay phone for the whole camp. I was camped farther away from everyone else in my group and didn’t dare yell for anyone because it was on my stomach. I was barely breathing to not piss it off. It was a large group so my absence wasn’t noticed right away. Someone eventually came to see if I was sleeping in or sick, saw the snake and went running to find the nature lodge people, who saved me.
edit: should add that it took them a while to find the nature lodge people who were out and about (again, no phones.) And then it took more time for them to agree on the best way to come in, protect my face and get it into a bag. It felt like eternity.
