Context: I am 30, and my sons are 11 and 9. They live with their mother on weekdays and I get them on weekends and any school holidays. When I get them on school breaks we love to go out and spend some time in the wilderness, I love wild camping and it’s great for some bonding time.
This happened last summer, they had pretty recently finished school for the year, so this was late July. We decided that we were going to go on an extended camping trip, a fortnight out in the wild. I knew a great place in Scotland where we could go. I went there with some mates not too long ago. There was a lake with clean water and shelter not too far away if the weather turned sour. We started planning our trip. My boys were very excited to be going on such a long outing. Our longest previous trip was only five days, so fourteen days was going to be a whole new game.
So, we gathered our supplies and made our way to our new home for the next fortnight. Everything started great, the weather was hot and as soon as we arrived all three of us stripped down to our trunks and went swimming in the lake. Though it did feel great after being sat in the hot car for five hours. The first few days were perfect, we were having an amazing time. But on day four or five was when things started going strange. It began simply, we had gone swimming in the lake and when we came back all our sleeping bags and blankets were gone. So I walked closer to the village to try and get some reception on the little flip phone I brought to see if one of my mates who lived not too far away would be able to bring us some. That’s when I saw our sleeping bags, hanging from a tree. They had been tied with ropes around the hoods as if they had been hanged with a noose. Suffice to say, this scared the crap out of me, but I assumed it was some prank done by stupid teenagers that had stumbled upon our camp. I untied them and went back to camp. I was considering going back home but my boys were loving it and I thought I was probably just overthinking things. I wish we packed up then and left.
A couple of days passed and by that point, I had convinced myself it was just a bad, unfunny prank. Hell, I’ve done dumb shit in the past that I regret, probably just something like that. At around night eight we were treated to a new horror. It was late, maybe 1 or 2 am. My boys were asleep, but I felt restless and was struggling to drift off. That’s when I heard a voice, it was raspy and low like they’d been smoking for at least a decade or two. I couldn’t quite make out what it was saying, but the sound sent daggers down my spine. I tried to listen carefully to make out what it was saying but it was no good, I got every third word at best and it wasn’t making any sense. It gradually sounded as if it were getting closer, and I was still frozen in fear. It couldn’t have been longer than ten seconds but it felt as if it were an eternity. Then it went quiet. There was no sound. I waited another ten seconds or so, trying to gather the courage to go out of my tent. I did, I waved my torch around and saw nothing. After that, I climbed into my sons’ tent and slept with them for the night.
Again, I stupidly tried to find a logical explanation. It was a bad dream I thought, I must have been half awake and I just imagined what I heard. There’s no reason to go home just because I’m feeling a little spooked. By this point the food we had brought was running dangerously low, so we decided that we would catch fish for our supper that evening. It was fun, and I love freshly caught fish. We spent all day fishing and by 5 pm-ish we went back with more than enough to fill our bellies and I started to prepare them for dinner. Gutted one, then two, until all but one remained. I sliced the last fish open, when thirty, maybe more, live maggots splat on my worktop. I’ve never seen that before, the first was newly caught maybe an hour or two before at most. It was disgusting and I should have taken it as yet another sign of what was to come. We ended up not eating the fish, I hate that we had wasted them, but none of us could look at them again after those maggots came out of one.
I heated some tinned soup, we ate and then went off to bed once more. Again, I stayed up later than I should have. Though maybe, looking back, that was for the best. Once more at 1 maybe 2 am I heard the voice, low and raspy, though this time I heard a second voice. It was clear that they were speaking English, or at least some of the words were English. Again, I could only understand every fourth word or so and what they were saying wasn’t making sense. Once again, the voices grew louder, they sounded like they were getting closer. I would have sworn they were maybe a metre or two away from tents. When the voices didn’t stop, I prepared myself mentally to protect my boys. I got up slowly and I moved to the entrance of my tent. I stepped out with my fists out in a mock fighting pose. I would have no clue what to do in a real fight, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to defend my kids.
I waved my torch around frantically searching for the origin of the noise when I saw them. Two long and thin figures at the edge of the forest, maybe ten metres away from where I stood. They were pale, almost translucent but also seemed to get off a faint glow. They looked up at me, with twisted expressions on their faces. They smiled at me. And then they slowly backed into the forest. The second they were out of sight I woke my boys up and got them in the car. We drove to the nearest motel.
The next day we went back to collect our camping equipment and then we headed home. That wasn’t the end to the camping trip that I wanted, and on the whole, I had managed to protect my boys from knowing the scary things that had been going on. Though, needless to say, we won’t be going back to that camping spot any time soon.