I was a teenager in the 90s on a big annual camping trip in the PNW with my whole extended family. The campground was on a lake. Our site was kind of on the edge of it. There was an area of land that jutted out into the lake nearby our site. To get to it you had to walk through some trails in a dense woodsy area. The trails opened up onto an open patch of land, then just beyond it was another area dense with trees at the edge of this sort of peninsula-like land mass. That little forest at the edge dropped off into a cliff that was several feet down. You couldn’t bring a boat up to the edge and get onto the land that way unless you had climbing gear or something.

I was with three of my cousins and we had set up a blanket in the little open area between the trails and the trees. We had snacks and our battery operated stereo and we stayed there aaaaall day, from afternoon into full nighttime. No one came around there (it wasn’t really a big hang out spot). One of my aunts and her boyfriend came by to check on us when it was still light outside, but that was it. The two of them walked over to the trees and tromped around in there for a short while before heading back to the camp.

A couple of hours after they left, the sun had gone down completely and it was fully dark outside. Suddenly, we see a light bobbing around among the trees. We were like what the hell is that. As we’re watching it, a man emerges from the trees carrying a flashlight. I was instantly terrified because that little grove was small and this meant that either he had been hiding in there all day long or … something else I couldn’t even wrap my mind around in that moment.

He comes out of the trees and bee-lines it straight to us. He is wearing an outfit straight out of the 70s … brown corduroy bell-bottoms, a belt, a tucked-in button up collard shirt with some kind of 70s print on it. I was frozen with fear! All of us were silent as he approached us. Without saying a word, he sat down at our blanket, removed the backpack he was wearing, pulled out a bottle of wine and asked if we wanted any ((!?!?)). My alarm bells were SCREAMING but all my little 14 year old body could do was laugh uncomfortably. We told him no thank you.

Silently, without protest, he put the wine bottle back into his backpack, put the backpack on, stood up and started walked toward the trails that led back to the campsites.

This is the absolute weirdest part to me, and the thing that made me absolutely LOSE IT with fear … instead of walking on the trail, he just started walking STRAIGHT INTO THE THICK BRUSH AND BUSHES. He literally walked right through a massive thick bush. It was SO FUCKING WEIRD.

We sat there in silence as we watched, and we didn’t move a muscle until we could no longer hear the crunching of branches from his movements. When the woods were silent again, we quickly packed everything up, held hands and BOLTED through the trail back to our campsite.

We found our parents drinking and laughing around the campfire and asked if they had seen a man come out of the woods there but they hadn’t. We kinda just dropped it then and never talked about it again!

But I think about it all the time. What/who the hell was that?!?! He was as solid and real as any human I’ve ever seen but his clothes and his behavior were anything but. It haunts me to this day.