So let me start off by saying that English is not my native language. I am from northern europe, which also happens to be where this story plays out.
At 14, i used to be a boy scout. I would sometimes follow along on hiking trips where we would usually hike for shorter periods of time and then end up staying in the scout troop’s own log cabin. The cabin was located around a pretty dense forest. It used to be pitch black out there during the night, and even something as simple as going to the nearby outhouse would scare me shitless. Anyways, this is where we would usually stay, and where I sort of would’ve expected us to stay when i signed up to join the hike.
But this one time was different. Instead of sleeping in the cabin like we used to, the scout troop had decided to camp by a campsite in the nearby woods. It wasn’t far away from the cabin, maybe a 5 minute walk at most. The campsite was located near a smaller river, and hiking trails could be seen almost everywhere.
Spotting wild boars is not uncommon in this area, so our troop leader immediately tells us upon arrival that we need to place our food waste further into the woods to reduce the chances of being awoken by a flock of hungry pigs sniffing up our tents.
Anyways, we pack up our things, prepare the shelter and then call it a night after a while of hanging out around the campfire.
This is when things start to get weird.
I wake up sometime in the middle of the night to a weird sound. I can see my friends laying in their sleeping bags looking all observant and creeped out too, so i knew that they must’ve heard it too.
At first the sound was somewhat hard to make out, but after a while i hear it loud and clear. A childs voice, repeating the same words over and over again.
“ʰᵉˡᵖ, ʰᵉˡᵖ”
it sounded too close to have been coming from the tent next to ours, yet too far away to have been from our tent. It was almost like the sound didn’t come from a certain direction, almost as if it was heard in stereo. I see one of my friends get up, look around and proceed to say:
“who said help?”
silence. not one person in the tent seemed to have a clue, and after a while i must’ve pretty much just accepted the absurdity of it all because i don’t remember falling asleep.
but i do remember waking up.
i woke up again, probably an hour or so later, in a state of panic. My heart was racing, i was sweating from head to toe and immediately got the gut-wrenching feeling that something, whatever it was, was terribly wrong.
i went outside my tent with crazy amounts of adrenaline pumping throughout my body. I pull down my pants and decide to take a leak to perhaps try and release some of that inner pressure i felt was building up.
All i remember after this is me waking up in my tent once again in the early morning. I felt fairly normal except for a horrible stomach ache that had arrived during the night. I head to the outhouse located a couple of minutes away and then make my way back to camp to pack all my stuff. I shrugged it all off as being some sort of bad reaction to the food i had been eating and didn’t think much of it after.
that was until we arrived back home.
a while later, i arrive back to my hometown together with the other scouts. we throw one last little meeting where we basically make a recap about the two days that we had been out hiking. everyone tells their stories and seemed to have had a joyful experience, but just as we are about to split up and go home, this one kid raises his hand and says something like:
“haha yeah, but WHO was crying for help?”
silence.
we all look at eachother. It seemed as if everyone had heard it, but no one recalled ever saying it. The silence is loud, and i can tell that some scouts are visibly freaked out by the fact that no one was admitting to have said it.
After all who knows, maybe it was just some casual sleep talking..
or maybe we weren’t actually alone out there.