When I was 12, I went camping with my mom, my brother and some family friends. This happened at the same remote place every summer and we always used the same campsites. This wasn’t campers or whatever, we set up tents and cooked food at a fire pit.
This one particular night, all the kids decided to share a tent to “sleep” in while the parents hung out in a connected campsite the whole group was renting as a sort of living room type space. We were just being idiots, nothing more or less than expected for a bunch of preteens left alone. After we had been doing that for a while, this one kid randomly says that he hears something nearby. We all are quiet for a minute but hear nothing. We decide to ignore this whole thing, but soon, we all heard it, and it was pretty close to us.
The kid who heard it first said it hadn’t been that close the first time he heard it. Nobody was actually scared, we all just sort of figured it was some kind of small animal, but still wanted to check it out. A bit of “just in case it’s not what we think it is” and a bit of “why the hell not?”
We all quietly crept out of the tent, one at a time, each holding a flashlight. We looked around but still saw nothing and heard the noise a few more times, but when anybody whipped around to look, there was nothing. At one point, I could have sworn I saw something small and shiny out of the corner of my eye before it disappeared.
After a while, we went back to the tent. I didn’t know this then, but we were all feeling this strange uneasiness as if we all felt we were being watched. None of us mentioned it until the next day. Nobody slept and we kept sticks nearby as some kind of weapon in a terrible situation, if it came to that.
That is NOT the end of the story, though. The next day, we were leaving, so everyone was helping to pack up. My mom couldn’t find this glass jar she had brought to keep my family’s toothbrushes in. Nobody could find it anywhere. It was a bit annoying, but nobody really cared.
As all the kids were going to pack up the tent we had used the previous night, the kid in front of me very abruptly stopped cold in his tracks. I was a little annoyed at first and shoved him aside to get there faster. I immediately saw why he stopped.
Two things were hanging from a tree right near the campsite.
One was the skin of a squirrel, cleanly removed in one piece.
The other was my mother’s jar, filled with its insides.
We all sprinted back to our parents. One kid threw up, and all of us were traumatized. Our parents were reasonably freaked out when they actually saw it. Everyone was in a We packed up as fast as we could and never went back.