69. Half Awake
My freaky experience happened a few years ago. My dad and I loaded some camping gear onto the back of our bicycles and left our home in Wisconsin to ride around a part of the state for a few days. I don’t like paying to sleep on the ground, so about an hour before dark, we’d start looking for somewhere we could disappear into the woods to pitch our tent for the night.
On the second night, we found a small grass path through the woods that went to a farm field quite a way off. We pitched our tent to one side of the path and quickly fell asleep. Until around 2:00 that night, when we were woken up by a sort of snorting sound outside the tent. Every, I don’t know, 30 seconds? A minute? We’d hear the noise come out of the woods behind us.
Figuring it was likely just a deer on the path from the woods to the farm field we were blocking, dad and I just started talking loudly to each other about it, hoping our voices would scare it away. When that didn’t work, I tried shining my light through the wall of the tent. Eventually, I ended up getting out of the tent, waving the light in the direction of the noise, and yelling at it to go away.
And then we never heard it again. I never saw so much as a pair of eyes reflecting the light, nor did I hear any plants moving around as it ran away, but the snorting sound stopped. Even though it most likely was just a deer, I had never heard a noise quite like that before. Once we fully woke up, we regained our wits, but in that brief period where we were only half awake, it was a terrifying noise.