A group of friends are camping near Sugar Pine Reservoir, California. They start to hear 'whispers' in the woods around them, scaring the group. They find a huge footprint the next morning.
I received the following account:
"Over Easter break in 2006 three friends and I went camping up near Sugar Pine Reservoir in California. There was still a ton of snow on the ground and the gates to the campsites at the lake were still locked, so we chose to go up the road and turned down a random logging road and continued on that until we found a good pull out. The road split and made a small loop, and there was a clearing that other people had been in fairly recently judging by the shotshells and trash we found. It looked decent though so we set up camp. It was a very cold sleet/rain for the duration of our time there and it was maybe a high of 40 degrees during the day (not high enough for all the snow to melt, even with a constant drizzle).
My friends were Mike, Jay, and Jay’s girlfriend Kari. The general layout was a big triangle. Jay and Kari’s tent at the top of the triangle, and paths from their tent to the tent I shared with Mike (we set up on the road next to my truck) and to an EZ-up that we set up and backed Jay’s truck to so we could use the tailgate as a cooking table. We didn’t walk around inside this triangle, just because we didn’t need to.
It was miserably cold and wet, and as the first evening wore on the wind picked up so the four of us sat in the EZ until fairly late just playing cards and drinking hot chocolate until we finally decided to call it a night. We weren’t drinking or doing drugs - crazy, high school seniors not doing that mostly because Jay and Kari were very religious. Kari was actually studying at a Pentecostal college in Stockton at the time.
Mike’s tent was big, and I had brought cots so we could sleep off the ground. Those came in super handy when we found out how bad the tent leaked - there was a good inch of standing water with ice forming in the tent.
After an hour or two I started hearing noises outside. I’ve camped/fished in that area since I was a toddler and was well aware of bears/mountain lions/most of the animals in the area and tried to figure out what was out there and realized it wasn’t animals. There was whispering and talking in the woods around our campsite. I hadn’t heard a vehicle, nor did I hear any crunching in the snow or on the exposed part of the road. I sat in building fear for 15 or 20 minutes listening to these voices - couldn’t make out what was being said, it was muffled - but they were male voices in the woods near and far. I would hear something near where Jay’s truck was at, then a response from near the road, etc. I was freaked out. Mike and I had our cots head to head and at the same moment I reached to wake him up he reached to wake me up (I had long hair at the time, he actually yanked my hair thinking he’d wake me up). We faced each other and the conversation was quick “You hear that? Those are voices, right? Like, someone is in our campsite. Yeah, dude. Let’s check it out.”
Of all the friends I have, Mike and Jay were two that I would take to a fight any day of the week. At the time Jay had black belts in at least one discipline and his dad had owned a martial arts studio- not to mention that he was an animal in the gym and on the football field. Mike had wrestled varsity for four years and played football as well. Whoever was looking to mess with us was about to have a bad night.
Mike and I moved very slowly to put on boots and move to the door of the tent so we wouldn’t make any noise before we were out and able to maneuver. We each took a flashlight, I had an AG Russel hunting knife and he had a kukri that we used for misc chopping needs. We counted a “1, 2, 3” and unzipped the door of the tent and exploded into the darkness, lights piercing into the woods and scanning the site and there was nothing. It wasn’t a full moon but there was enough light for us to see in the clearings pretty well and we moved up and down the road a bit calling into the dark. “Who’s out there? Where are you? Hey, we can hear you. What do you want? Where are you at?”
But there were no replies. Just silence. We walked around for a good 10 minutes - at this point much more scared than we’d been before leaving the tent. We clicked off the flashlights and hid in the shadows of trees near our tent, hoping that if we got quiet the whispers would start again and we could find who was doing it, but we were met with silence.
Kari finally called out from their tent
“Hey, I heard that too, guys. The voices in the woods. It wasn’t me and Jay.”
We talked briefly with Jay and Kari. Jay hadn’t heard a thing, but Kari said she’d been awake for hours listening to them.
We went back to our tent but kept our boots on and lay with lights and knives in hand for a cold, sleepless night.
After dawn, we got up and went to the EZ-up, where Kari started breakfast. The three of us dudes were drinking coffee and Kari went to dump something outside and almost immediately started yelling for all of us. We run out of the EZ-up and she points to the middle of that triangle - the one formed by our paths, the one that we didn’t walk in the middle of - right at a footprint. We walked out to look at it, and sure enough, a good ten feet from the paths we’d created, was a single footprint. A human footprint, with five toes and a good arch. And nothing else around it. The print was only an inch or two deep in the snow, and the day before had been a drizzle all day. That footprint would have been washed away by the rain had it been there before we got there.
We were properly freaked out. We destroyed the print for peace of mind. The better part of that day we spent hiking, making a couple loops (about 200 and 500 meters) around our site, and traveling up and down the road. We found no fresh tire tracks, no fresh footprints, no snowshoe tracks, no nothing.
None of us had any idea what was in the woods with us that night. That evening, Kari and Jay left. Mike and I tried to sleep in the cab of my truck but it was more of us sitting awake, with the keys in the ignition, doing a check every time one of us got scared to make sure that the truck would still start.
At light the next morning we bounced, and I haven’t been up that road since. The general area was Sugar Pine Reservoir, California, and a little northwest of the lake, near Indian Creek. We were back in those logging roads somewhere." A
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