Forgive my lack of good typing skills, I’m not great at writing this stuff in text.
This happened on my birthday, I had turned 15 and my dad wanted to take me and my two brothers camping. My older brother (who we’ll call Xander for privacy reasons) was in his edgy, hates life phase and didn’t want to go, but my dad made him anyway. My younger brother (who we’ll call Tommy) was excited and quite frankly pumped to go on this trip.
I should probably mention this but I had just gotten a phone for my birthday, I’d never had one before so I didn’t know how to use them, my dad also lent me a pocket knife and matches to use in case of emergencies.
Now we all lived in England but my dad wanted to take us into the wild, so we took a four hour drive to take us from England, all the way to Wales.
My dad wanted to take us to an area called Wentwood. He’d been a few times and he wanted to take us, I had downloaded some games on my phone so I could play stuff offline, and Tommy was watching. Xander was examining the pocket knife.
By the time we got there it was getting dark-ish (since my birthday is in autumn or fall as Americans call it). So we found an opening where we made a fire pit, set up some tents, and played board games. It was a nice evening and by 1am, my dad and little brother had gone to bed. My dad had told Xander and I to not explore too far away from camp, but we were troublesome teenagers and decided too anyway.
Now for some context, Wentwood is MASSIVE, it’s like 2500 acres, which is about 3.9 miles. So it’s pretty easy to get lost, especially when it’s dark and you don’t have a liable map source. Xander still had the pocket knife, and I had my phone just in case we needed to call someone if we got lost. I also realised that Xander had another idea, he had actually brought some weed with him (idk how none of us smelt it), and he said “Now that you’re 15, you can get your first hit.” As you can imagine, I wasn’t fully open to the idea, but I didn’t really think there would be an issue.
So we headed off into the dark woods, we found an area where we lit some matches, and smoked -the area was a small gap in the trees with a log that had a mushroom growing on it-. I didn’t find it very pleasant but I did it because it was a decent bonding experience with Xander. After we were done and ready to head back, I got the realisation. My mind immediately thought. where the hell are we? This is when both me and Xander realised almost simultaneously that being high off our asses and in the middle of a dark forest without a map was an AWFUL idea.
We started to panic. We were both actually scared since we didn’t remember the way back. That’s when I remembered my phone had data, maybe we could look for a ranger station to show us the way back to our camp area. But as I said that to my brother he told me that they would know we were smoking pot and we could get arrested.
But as we were thinking about what to do next, we heard a whistle. Now we knew this was a forest with a lot of people in so we didn’t immediately get shaken up by it, but a minute later, we heard it again. That’s when we stopped to listen out, a minute later… again. We started counting the seconds between the whistles and it was exactly 60 seconds (idk how we did this whilst being quite high btw).
And after 10 times exactly, it stopped, and took every other sound from the forest with it. It was eerily quiet, the silence was almost deafening. Then we heard a rustle directly to the left. Maybe 20 seconds later, another to our right, me and Xander both looked at eachother and got up, whatever was whistling is ambushing us.
Xander and I immediately started running, but he tripped over the log and injured his ankle. I helped him up and we started running, Xander was usually quite fast but with his injured ankle I was 10x faster than him.
After about 5 minutes of running, me and him had gotten even more lost. But that’s when a bright light shines at us, it was a man, maybe in his late 40s, early 50s. He had a long beard and looked like your standard GTA redneck NPC (he was tall, maybe around 6.5, he was stocky and fairly built with a large stomach that stuck out). He asked us why we were out here. So we told him everything, he agreed to help us find our camp, and that’s when I noticed on his belt a machete.
For about 40 minutes, we wandered through the dark, but nothing. At this point it was about 4 in the morning, and the sky was still pitch black. But finally we found our tent, we thanked the man for helping us, and he left. Me and Xander went to our tent and went to sleep.
At about 6 in the morning, Xander and I woke abruptly. The whistle, we heard it again, this time it sounded right outside our tent, we looked at each-other, and that’s when we saw it. A shadow of a man, a man who was tall, around 6.5, stocky and fairly built with a large stomach that stuck out, it was the man, and we saw him walk away, then we heard the whistle. I thought that maybe the man was probably using a strategy, so that we’d lead him to our tents. And after maybe 20 minutes, the man finally left. Later that day me and my brother told my dad everything, and we all agreed we would never go back here at night.
So what did I learn from this experience, I learnt that no matter how kind a person seems on the inside, you never know their true intentions. Stay careful out there guys, and if you can, avoid staying overnight in Wentwood.