My brother stills tells me it was a dream. BUT whenever I think back to this I vividly remember the entire experience from start to finish.
I was around 14 and at our week long scout camp outting. Someone took our normal campsite and we got the worst one, Buckskin. It sucked because it was the furthest from everything by far and nowhere near other Troops. Being the youngest, my friend and I took the lean-to furthest away from everyone else (they were all laid out in a big circle and this meant carrying our stuff the furthest).
Our hut was right against the woods and while everyone else was nice and close we were a small dot on the outside of that circle. Now this lean-to I’ll call it was basically a big wooden tent with a canvas top and a 6ish foot opening at the front and back to walk through.
So my friend, who I love dearly, “got sick” the last night of camp (he would always “get sick” the last night so that he didn’t have to help take down and clean up camp the next day). He packed up his stuff and walked out towards the path to get picked up by his mom right after dark. A typical night in a Scout camp is all the kids would stay up until curfew then get sent to bed where they would talk and goof off for a while and the adults would sit around the fire until everyone dropped off to sleep. So the fire is extinguished, everyone is off in bed and I’m bored and trying to doze laying in this two bed lean-to just starring up at the canvas surrounded in my mosquitos net and tucked into my sleeping bag. I start to hear this crunching in the leaves from the woods like someone is pacing back and forth and then it just stops. No big deal, there’s animals all over at night. I doze off and wake up when I start hearing it again and the sound get closer and closer like someone is walking up. So I sit up and there’s a person standing inside my lean-to holding part of the cover over their head. At this point I honestly wasn’t a touch scared because I was so sure it was my friend coming back because he forgot something. I said “I thought you went home” to the person.
But they didn’t respond and hesitated for a second like they were going to step forward. A sinking feeling that I still remember to this day set in as I realized how big this person was. It was no 14 year old. So I said “whose there?” And they just turned and ran out of the lean-to and went crashing into the woods so I screamed, tore through my net towards the opening and ran to the center of camp. Everyone woke up and the adults walked around with flashlights in the woods for a bit but told me I had a bad dream or it was just a deer because another adult heard the sound of something running off before I yelled. I ended up sleeping on the floor on top of other people’s bags with the older kids because I was so terrified.