Thanks for all the enthusiastic comments! I was very touched to know that people enjoyed reading.
This next story takes place in 2009 in Lakeshore, CA. It’s out past Fresno in the Sierras. Huntington Lake proper.
I was employed at a Boy Scout camp as a full-time cook.
Now, this camp was way, way out in the absolute middle of nowhere. (This is also the same place where I came face to face with a black bear and was stalked by a mountain lion in the middle of the night)
Not only was I a cook, but I had to be EMT certified in case any other employees became injured and I happened to be the only person around. We also had nights where we’d draw straws and do ‘bear watch,’ and walk around with a rifle and we’d pull the trigger off into the trees to scare the bears away if any came perusing into camp trying to break into the kitchen.
This story takes place on one of the nights I had bear watch.
So, it was the end of the summer and all the boy scouts left and I had only two weeks left on the job, cleaning up the camp and making it seem as if nothing and nobody had ever been there.
In this camp, there was a lodge that was kind of well-hidden, way up in the hills. It was about a mile hike, and oftentimes the bears would break in and open up the refrigerator (every now and then people left food behind).
So, this lodge was one of the places that I had to investigate on my bear watch route.
This lodge had not only a bear problem, but just a problem in general in the sense that homeless people were always breaking into it and lodging themselves for the night.
Two weeks before this particular story takes place I was out on bear watch and went up to inspect the lodge and had found empty whiskey bottles and pornographic magazines strewn all about the place.
Usually it’d be young campers or co-workers, but oftentimes they were pretty good about not leaving stuff behind that would only incriminate them. Either way, if ever I found something that wasn’t supposed to be there, I’d just keep that information to myself and didn’t care for getting people in trouble.
So, on this particular night, I’m doing bear watch, and I’m trekking up towards the lodge and I notice that there is some loud clattering noises coming from inside.
Now, I’m anticipating a bear and I certainly don’t want to get to close to the feckin’ thing, so I’m considering firing a shot and hopefully scare the bears away (this doesn’t always work, sometimes that just makes them more angry).
But at that time I noticed then that there were lights moving about the lodge. It seemed to be two flashlights that were searching the place.
So, I know at this point that it’s certainly not a bear but rather a person, or rather, two people. Now, all the boy scouts are gone and there was only me and my friend BJ to clean the camp up. BJ was back in the tent for the night so I knew it wasn’t him.
It is never a good thing when you’re out in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night and you know you should be the only person for miles and then suddenly you see some other form of civilization.
So, I am nervous at this point, but rather than running away or firing my rifle, I get the brilliant idea to creep up and investigate exactly what is going on.
As I approached the lodge, maybe a couple yards away now I hear a grown man screaming at the top of his lungs, “Where are my fucking magazines?”
At that point a feckin’ flashlight bursts through one of the windows in the lodge and comes careening towards my feet. I stood there, looking down on the thing, dumbfounded.
Then I hear another voice shout, “Nice fuckin’ goin’, Dave! Now how we s’posed to keep the heat in?”
The voice that just spoke revealed himself as one of the largest men I’ve ever seen, easily 6’4” and scary looking. He walks up to the window, peers outside and shines his flashlight straight into my eyes, as I stare at the guy, dumbfounded.
“There’s someone out there, Dave,” he said. “And he’s got a rifle.”
“Well,” I could hear Dave say from inside, “Grab the shotgun.”
I said Nope to that and turned around and ran off into the darkness. I was sure I escaped into the invisible night rather quickly but all I could think was two pissed off country-bumpkins were coming after me with a shotgun.
I got down to the tent, told BJ that we had to book it, we packed up our shit, got on a schooner, and hightailed it out of there across the lake to the saloon and called the rangers letting them know two rogues were lodging at our camp and that they were armed.
The rangers came about an hour and a half later. They searched the lodge. Not a trace of a soul had ever been there…those two bumpkins were never found.
Hope you enjoyed. More stuff coming on the way. Creepy, creepy stuff.
Submitted February 08, 2017 at 10:29AM by nicholascoffey http://ift.tt/2ljjrXP nosleep
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