Welcome listeners, to yet another chilling episode of "Beyond the Unknown." I'm your host, Joli, and I'm Quinn, and today, we are embarking on an unsettling journey across the worlds most terrifying campsites. Will you dare to go camping after today’s stories?
Now that we are in May, approaching those warm weather months here in Canada, I thought it might be the perfect time to scare the Bejesus out of you before you go on your next camping trip. I have found three of creepiest stories ever – you will be in your tent sleeping with the flashlight on and with one eye open, if you dare go camping at all. But stay with me, because we will save the scariest for last though … do you think you can make it to the end?
For the first story, I am taking you to rural Maine. If you don’t know, Maine is North Eastern USA, bordering Canada, and is just below mine and Jo’s home province of New Brunswick. This state sits along the Atlantic Ocean with beautiful green lush forests and rugged rocky coastal lines. There are also tons of rivers and fresh water bodies. It’s a camper’s dream really. In 1976, four young men, Jack, his twin brother Jim and two of their friends Chuck and Charlie set out on a two-week camping trip in the Allagash wilderness. This is in the most Northern part of the state. The first couple of days of the trip were pretty uneventful – the guys fished, made bonfires and slept in their tents under the night sky. On the second night, Jim noticed something unusual in the sky. It seemed like a bright object. This was unusual because they were in the DEEP DEEP wildness, like, there would be no lights or buildings or such. So he grabbed his binoculars to inspect it further for 15-30 seconds and suddenly the object seemed to have folded in on itself and disappeared from sight. Not thinking too much of it, the guys went to bed and the next few days were again, pretty uneventful. On the fouth day, they decided to do some night fishing. Before heaving out on their canoe, they built a fire to mark their campsite. Once out on the water, Chuck got an eerie feeling. That sensation that you are beibg watched. You know the one? Have you ever had that? Whenever I get that, and I should otherwise be alone, it makes me extremely uneasy. With all other three men in front of him, he slowly turns over his right shoulder, almost afraid to even look. That is when he noticed this super bright round globe. The light seemed to roll around kind of how you would image the fire balls dancing on the sun. This thing was so beight it lit the trees around it like it was daylight. It reminded them of the bright thing seen by Jim just a few nights earlier. Seeing it twice now, they couldn’t just shrug it off. They wanted to try to signal to it. They took a flashlight and I quote squeezed off an SOS message. I have no idea what this means. But whatever it was they did seemed to have drawn this thing towards them because almost immediately afterwards this fireball actually started to creep towards them. Instantly, the guys regretted trying to signal this thing and fled back to shore as fast as they could. However, the bright object kept up with them overtop and almost seemed to overtake them. Finally, they had made it to shore, but so had this “thing” and they were just staring up at it from their canoe. It was so close they could have probably hit it with a stone. Then just like that, in a flash, the bright mass zoomed upwards and basically blended in with the stars in the night sky. The next thing they recall is stepping out the canoe feeling pretty calm. They guess the whole fishing trip + ordeal was no more than 20 minutes. But yet somehow, the massive bonfire they had built before leaving, which should have burned for hours, was basically reduced to smoldering coal. The guys all felt super tired and didn’t stay up to chat about what had happened. The next morning, they woke up, made some breakfast, packed up and headed off to the next campsite. Over the remaining 10 days of the trip, there were no further experiences with this weird fire ball. When the trip was over, and the men returned to their families, they did actually tell people about the experience. They even speculated that it must have been a UFO but no one believed them. But if they were honest they weren’t even sure if they believed it themselves.
Not too long after, Jack started to have a really bizarre recurring nightmare. It became so consistent and so disturbing to him that he confided in his wife Mary about what he had been experiencing. He always found himself in a brightly lit room, but not a room that he recognized and having no idea why he was there. To his left, he would see his brother Jimk Chuck and Charlie sitting on a bench. All of the men were always naked. He never understood why the others weren’t helping him because he always felt terrified. He would then look at a bright light ahead of him and see a dark shadowy figure emerging from the light, and that is typically when he would suddenly wake in a panicky state of terror covered in sweat and breathing heavily. Many years later, in 1988, Jim, Jack’s twin brother, finally admitted that he too was having nightmares. His dreams were almost identical, in that Chuck and Charlie were with them, and it he would wake up feeling helpless and with a sense of having been violated. There would always been some sort of creature in the dream too. Given the similarity of their dreams, and that Chuck and Charlie were always featured, they wondered if it had something to do with their 1976 camping trip. Wanting to get to the bottom of it they reached out to a UFO researcher Ray Fowler who suggested they try hypnotherapy to uncover more details. Chuck and Charlie agreed to be hypnotized as well. The outcome was startling – all four men recounted almost the exact same scenario and even drew pictures that were nearly identical of some of the key elements. Basically, all of them recalled being taken aboard a craft, stripped naked and having medical examinations performed. Sample of their skin and body fluids, including semen, urine and blood, were even taken from them. Chuck recalls specifically watching this happen to his brother and that it looked like he was in pain, but that they were not able to help him and they could only watch it happen. They didn’t chat about the stories until AFTER the hypnosis and then realized they had all told the same stories. However, not being totally sold that these guys didn’t crate this story beforehand, they all underwent a polygraph test…..and they passed.
If you haven’t checked out Episode 16 – Aliens on Earth, be sure to do so, because, not only is it a creepy episode, but it actually talks about a few alien abduction stories while camping. Im not going to repeat those stories here, but apparently getting abducted by aliens while camping is a real epidemic.
So if you manage to escape alien abduction you still aren’t in the clear. You also really need to watch out for something else that might be lurking in the woods.
Our next story takes us Southwest to the stunning landscape of New Mexico, just 14 miles North east of Santa Fe. Sitting just outside of the Pecos wilderness, this location is so aptly named the Holy Ghost Campground. Apparently, it is VERY challenging to find this campground and travellers have described the backroads required to use as extremely creepy. The kind of roads that make you second guess heading to the destination at all….however, it is said, that if you can first tolerate the creepy travel and second actually find the place, that it will have all been worth it, because this campground is apparently breathtaking. Nestled among cottonwood trees, this stunning campground is a serene retreat bordered by the Holy Ghost creek. When the sun goes down though, the campground transforms from beautiful to eerie and youll then see why it is known as the most haunted place in New Mexico….
Campers have reportedly caught sight of a dark figure of a man that hobbles towards them, and when they turn to talk to this person, there is no one there. Apparently this is the ghost of a Catholic priest who was killed in the 17th century by the Pueblo Peoples who are Indigenous to this land. As did many Catholic groups at this time, this Priest was trying to convert the people. The tensions between the Spaniards and the Pueblo Peoples was deep seated, as during this time, the Spaniards were enslaving all Indigenous men over the age of 25 and cutting off one of their feet. The Indigenous Peoples were also mandated to attend mass and participate in all things Catholic. So, in order to defend themselves, the Pueblos people in this region killed this particular Priest. He is said to haunt the campgrounds ever since. There are also stories of a lot of unusual disappearances, included State Troopers who have simply vanished. It is not clear whether this is felt to be related to this haunting or whether these are simply classic tales of people missing or murdered in the deep wilderness.
Alrighty, so you somehow didn’t get abducted by aliens, and you still have your wits about you since you aren’t haunted by an evil spirit, but you’re still going to have to watch your back. To me, this next story is truly the scariest.
Stay tuned for Part 2 to learn about what happened to an elderly couple on their annual camping trip in the Austalian wilderness. What secrets will we uncover?
Thank you for joining us for another episode of "Beyond the Unknown." If you have a story you’d like to share, please email us at moody.mediaprod@gmail.com. You can reach out on our website, and who knows, your story might be featured in our next episode.
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Until next time, listeners. Stay curious and remember that the unknown is always just beyond the shadows.
BYEEEE
