88. In the Dead of Night
Backpacking in the woods with a group. I’m a bit of an insomniac, so I was up far after everyone else. We wanted to pack as light as possible and it was summer so we just had a tarp on the ground and put our sleeping bags on top of it. We are completely out in the open. It was after midnight and I was still tossing and turning. Then I hear footsteps.
I had heard a deer/coyote or something else with four legs running through the brush earlier, but this was definitely bipedal. What/whoever it was came right to the edge of the clearing, about 15-feet from us. I could just barely make out a shadow of the figure, but it was pitch black out and hard to tell what it looked like. It looked like it was swaying side to side, or looking around the clearing.
Then it turned and rushed into the woods, and I heard the running footsteps. Once they faded into the distance, I finally felt like I could breathe. I was considering waking someone up. Then I heard the most blood-curdling scream from the direction the thing went. I shook my friend awake, who was more experienced and familiar with the area. All he said was, “Dude it’s just a fox, go back to sleep.”
I told him I heard the footsteps and saw it and it was not a fox, but he just dismissed it completely and insisted I go back to sleep. I sat there for what felt like forever feeling paranoid and scared until I just gave up and took an extra dose of my sleep meds because I figured the anticipation was worse than being killed in my sleep.