I bring this story here mostly to search for some sort of answer. This happened a few years ago, I was 16 and my friend T was 17 or 18. We were friends since 13, and always loved hiking and outdoorsy stuff amidst a bunch of other stuff. Being the age we were, finally able to drive, we wanted to go backpacking. I had an infatuation with it, and T always liked to tag along for stuff like this. We spent hours together planning and packing, just excited to go on a trip together. We love doing stuff like that together even still.
The day came and we woke early, excited for our days ahead. We stopped for food on our way and spent time chatting about the trail, weather, our food & water, and the rest of our plans.
We arrived at the reserve (gonna leave it unnamed as I live near-ish to it still) on a sweltering day. 90 degrees, beating sun, made worse by 50 pound packs, but that didn’t matter. We reserved our site by dropping an envelope with $10 and our information in a box. After about 6 miles of sweaty huffing and puffing through the woods of Wisconsin we made it to the site. Setting up my one man Coleman tent and Ts hammock went without a hitch. We saw the only person that day around this time; a lady running on the trail towards the start of the trail. Just that one person, the whole time we were out in the reserve.
We did some exploring of our area and found a little reservoir of collected water from a small trickle of water made by a spring uphill. We rinsed of the sweat and grime that had collected on our skin. It was absurdly cold water but that was refreshing.
Some time passed, some card games, and some mediocre dinner and night closed in. I climbed into my tent and T into his hammock. Thunder could be heard in the distance which had me worried, but we were covered so I wasn’t too afraid of a little rain.
It was not a little rain.
As I’m writing this I realize how dumb it was of us to be feet away from a creek bed, but it ended up not being an issue. What was an issue was our inability to fall asleep. We sat through an hour of an unrelenting downpour, worried about our things getting wet. T and I would chat here and there about how much rain it was, laughing about the situation we got ourselves in and the morning we were gonna have. I say this to clarify that we weren’t fearful of our surroundings, spirits were up even though 3+ inches of rain just came down. It was about midnight.
Then we heard a knock. It echoed through the woods, bouncing around the valley we were in. It was reminiscent of person hitting a tree with a bat as hard as they could. It was a hollow noise, not like a damp piece of a living tree hitting another damp piece of tree.
“Did you hear that?” I said to T.
“Yeah man.”
“What the fuck was th-“
Another knock, the same noise, closer this time, echoing.
“Dude what the hell is that?” I whispered.
A pause.
“I don’t fucking know dude.” T whispers back.
That was it, silence after that. T and I fell asleep, awoke the following morning, and hiked out without mentioning it.
I just want to know what the fuck that was. We were 10 miles from the nearest home, and further from the nearest town. I could brush it off as some broken branches hitting other branches, but there wasn’t the noise of it falling to the ground or hitting other branches. Just one loud knock followed by one more closer knock. It keeps me up at night sometimes. I haven’t been backpacking since.