Episode Details

Zach writes, "I'll go into my encounter in 2005. I lived in South Webster at the time and we were maybe five miles from the Wayne National Forest Trail Head.

I graduated high school the year before and we would go up to the national forest and drive around the gravel roads up there. We called it the New road because it was built sometime in the 90s and allowed access throughout the forest. They set up primitive campsites and trails for 4wheelers and hunters. I deer and coon hunted it a lot as a young man and ran traps in the rivers running through the forest for muskrat and mink. Never in all my years out there have I encountered anything unusual beside a couple wild dog encounters and seeing a giant wild boar one morning. It was a last minute camping trip with friends one night that we all had an encounter.

Me and some friends decided to camp out on the new road one Saturday evening. It was the end of September and the nights were becoming cold and chilly. We packed up my buddy Erics box van with beer and blankets then he followed me up the road behind my ford escort. We got to our campsite which was a dead end gravel road in Wayne National Forest. The locals use the circle turn around spot for target practice so there's always shotgun shells and broken beer bottles everywhere. We cleaned up the area then start a fire. It was dark when we started the fire and kept it roaring through most of the night. We backed the van close to the fire and sat in the back just hanging out and bull*****. The first weird thing we noticed was every once in a while we would hear a ding off the top of the van. The first few times we didn't pay much attention to it. I thought it was acorns falling or a bird dropping something from the trees over head. Well it kept happening so my buddy Eric climbs on top of the van and finds two gravel stones laying on the roof of his van. It was the same gravel from the gravel road we came in on.

We laughed and though maybe it had popped out from under my tire and landed on the roof of his van because he did follow me a few miles through the forest on that gravel road. But it kept happened and as it got closer to midnight it was happening more often. Sometimes two rocks hitting at a time. We heard 4wheelers in the distance earlier that night and so my buddy starts yelling into the woods thinking it was someone messing with us. After Eric yelled and threw gravel back into the woods it seemed to stop. We finish our drinks (which was a 12 pack of Natty Light) then later down in the van to sleep for the night. I wanna say it was around 2am when we hit the hay.

Anyway a couple hours later maybe around 4am I woke up to the sound of wood breaks and crashes in the forest. I woke Eric up and we sat there and listened to the woods cracking around our camping spot. If you ever seen the Blair Witch Project and remember the campers being woke up at night and the crashing in the woods around them. That's what it sounded like. It was coming from different directions and once we stepped out of the van we noticed the sounds were coming from down the hill around our spot. The camping spot sat at the top of a hill and it was a sharp incline down on both sides and completely forested. After standing out here and listening for 15 mins or so we heard a loud crash closer to us so I grabbed the spotlight and we started shining down the hill into the woods.

I shined for a few mins before I saw two yellow eyes looking up towards us from a bush thicket. I couldn't make out the figure in the brush but thought it was something tall or something on a tree because the eyes looked like they were above the ground quite a bit. We watched it for a min then the eyes disappeared. I thought maybe it was a raccoon messing around. There is bear sightings there but it's very uncommon to cross one. We started shining on the other side of the hill and soon we heard a bi