In the summer of 2013, a young woman named Katie and her father decided to go camping at one of their favorite campgrounds in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. Katie loved going camping with her father because he was an accomplished outdoorsman and he used to be a wilderness guide for much of his life. She felt really safe when she was out in the wild with him and she kind of became a fairly accomplished outdoors woman herself.
When they arrived at the campground, the parking lot was packed with cars, and they wished that they called ahead a couple of weeks to have a site reserved because there's probably no available now. They went to the front desk and the man there said that there was only one site available, but it's the one that's way over there. It was this one campsite that was isolated from the rest of the campground. It was far away from the bath house, far away from where you'd go swimming, and it was far away from the parking lot. It was just really inconvenient.
Whenever they came camping here it was the only site they didn't want to use. Nonetheless, they were still happy to even have a site and so they drove all the way down a little road into this very isolated campsite about in the middle of the forest.
Once they got there, they began setting up their respective tents because they were not going to be staying in the same tent. They each had very small backpacking tents which were so small that they could either zip it up all the way and stay warmer and more protected, but you had to sleep in a ball because their legs would not fit otherwise. Or they could unzip the front of their tents and can lay down and extend their legs fully out.
After they set up their tents, they get their coolers set up and they have all of their stuff the way they want it. They go out hiking for the rest of the day. When they come back, they're totally exhausted. They fall asleep and nothing of note occurs over that first night.
The next day they get up, they go back out, they go hiking all day all over again and they come back that night and they are totally exhausted again. They get into their tents, and they go to bed again. Katie wakes up at 3 A.M. and she hears footsteps walking toward the campsite from a little way off. They're in the woods somewhere and she's thinking, "It's going to be my father because he's diabetic and every night he gets up to go to the bathroom maybe three or four times. He probably was just walking to the bath house and now he's walking back."
She immediately realizes that the bath house is the opposite direction of where the footsteps are coming in from. She now thinks that her dad is walking towards the campsite from a different direction. The footsteps come out of the tree line, they come into the clearing that is their campsite and they stop about 2-3 meters outside of Katie's tent.
There were no windows on Katie's backpack tent, there was just little vents at the front and the back that pointed down so she couldn't see out. Also, there was no illumination out so she couldn't even pick up a silhouette. It's just total darkness out there so she could only hear them. Katie thinks that maybe her dad got lost coming back from the bath house because he didn't have a flashlight and he walked too far. What she really wants to hear at this point is to hear that person walk away from her tent and get into her father's tent to confirm that it is her father.
Katie is just sitting inside of her tent waiting for that confirmation and she hears the footsteps again. But instead of walking around her tent and into her father's tent, this person walks right up against her tent very quickly. The person starts to lean over Katie's tiny tent because she can hear them breathing right above her and this is when she realizes that is not her father. She's having this terrible revelation that some stranger is outside her tent right now; she has an even worse revelation. It was a warm night, so she was sleeping with her tent unzipped and her legs poking out the end. She musters the courage to begin slowly retracting her legs back inside of her tent, but before she's able to do that this person stands up, turns, and starts walking towards the base of her tent where her legs are.
She's completely frozen and terrified about what's about to happen but this person doesn't stop at her feet. They keep moving and start circling her tent. Katie swiftly manages to pull her legs back into her tent without this person hearing her. She had the illusion of safety being inside of her tent, but her tent is still unzipped. She's waiting for this person to come around and crouch down to look inside of her tent because it's open. Katie is looking down there hoping that doesn't happen, but unfortunately right at this moment, the person waled to the base of her tent and came to a stop right outside where the opening to the tent is.
"Please don't come in, please don't come in here." Katie thinks. And even though her feet are pulled up into her tent she suddenly feels something pinch her foot and she knows it's a hand. Something has grabbed my foot, and she stifles the scream, and she starts shaking uncontrollably because her instincts are telling her to not let this person know that she is awake. Luckily, as she's sitting there, shaking from fear and trying to be quiet while holding her mouth, this person stands back up again and goes back to the spot next to her tent and leans over the tent once again and she can hear them breathing right over her. For several minutes she lay there shaking with this random person who pinched her foot a minute ago, hovering over her tent in the middle of the night. She has nothing she can do and she's just quiet, hoping that this was going to end soon.
Eventually this person turns around and walks over to their cooler and table and other things that were out. She hears some things are being moved around and then this person just walks off into the distance, but she doesn't know if they're gone for good, if they're standing in the edge of the tree line waiting for her to come outside. Maybe they laid a trap for her and so she just lays there silent and doesn't move. Katie begins praying to herself, "Please don't let anything happen to me or my father." All night she's laying there and then eventually falls asleep, probably hours go by, but she does fall asleep.
She wakes up to her father unzipping his tent so she charges out to meet him and she can tell right away that he's scared. Before she can even say or begin to describe what's happened to her. Her father says, "Were you outside your tent last night at about two or three in the morning because I heard all sorts of commotion near our cooler. I wasn't sure if it was an animal or you." Right away Katie starts told him no and describes what happened to her. While she was still describing what happened to her, Katie's dad looks behind her at the picnic table which was right next to their cooler, and they had their backpacks on it. Anything that didn't fit in their tents they kept near this picnic table, and he points at it, and she turns around. Any item that was in the cooler, their backpacks, or that was just out has been stacked in a pyramid formation on this table.
Clearly, the guy who was here last night did this for some reason that they don't understand. As they go over to look at it to see if anything's been taken, they noticed this track of heavy footprints that have been going around and around Katie's tent, so she clearly wasn't imagining it. At that instant they packed everything up, got in their car, and they left. To this day they can barely talk about it with each other because it's all the things that could have happened. The father felt horribly guilty because he clearly heard this person but didn't leave his tent and his daughter was clearly in danger. Kaite's thinking with how the tent was open and this person was crouched down, reaching into my tent and grabbing my feet is such a horrifying image. This trip has been completely traumatizing for them and they just don't talk about it anymore.
Comments