Real Encounters

*A Deeply Unnerving Forest Memory*

*This story does not have any encounter with strangers, it is an creepy experience told by other.*

I grew up in Southern Ontario, and not having too much to do in my hometown would often spend weekends hiking out in forests with my dad. To this day I'm a great nature lover, and I think a lot of that comes from my experiences out in the woods as a young boy. There's one memory however that stands out as a little eerie.

On weekends my father would often take me for drives on little country roads. We'd pull over at the side if we saw a farm or river or anything else that we wanted to get out to investigate.

On one such day I asked my dad if we could walk through a forest I saw at the side of the road, and he agreed. We walked into the forest for about ten or fifteen minutes before my dad stopped dead in his tracks. He saw a fairly new looking bicycle which had recently been chained to a tree, there were no signs or rust on the chain or bike. Next to the bike was an amateur path leading off through the underbrush. Even to seven or eight year old me, seeing a new bicycle so deep in an unnamed forest which was at the side of a gravel road with no houses around seemed a little odd. Close by we found an apparently full backpack which had been left partially obscured in a bush. My dad was horrified by the bicycle, whispering to me an elaborate story about how he thought the owner of a grow op (drug activity) had left it there, and that they'd be liable to kill us if they found us.

It was shocking just how terrified my dad was, he was a man of a strong constitution and didn't spook easily, and seeing him in such a state really unsettled me. Although the bike was out of place, there wasn't anything really frightening about it, and even at the time I thought the grow op conclusion was a bit of a jump. I still can't figure out why my dad got so scared by it. Shortly before he died I brought the story up with him, and he insisted he had "sensed danger", an especially odd comment coming from him, my father being a great skeptic and Evangelical atheist who delighted in tearing down any belief which was vaguely unscientific. He couldn't explain it to me when I pressed him further about it, insisting over and over again that he "sensed danger", which becomes even eerier in context with the rest of the story.

We headed back out of the forest at a brisk pace. The forest floor was covered in autumn leaves (funny how vividly I can remember the look of that forest, how it was just a little bit muddy, the shade of orange the leaves were) and he kept whispering frustratedly at me to walk more quietly, which I can remember stressing me out a lot, worried that I'd make too much noise and w'd be caught. We were a relatively short distance in the forest, so I'm not sure quite how we managed it, but we ended up going down the wrong path, which only made my dad more tense.

As we tried to make our way back to the car, I spotted something ahead which made me feel deeply uneasy, it was like I could recognize the constitute parts of what I was seeing, but together they made no sense. I can't remember the exact order of events, but I'm fairly sure that my dad didn't see it until I pointed it out to him, I'll never forget the look on his face. In the middle of the forest was a tree covered in about twenty or so winter coats, each hanging at the end of a branch like executed criminals. Most of the coats were the brightly coloured and patterned designs from the 90's and early 2000's, made from that nasty plastic fabric. They were the kind of tacky numbers which used to populate the racks at thrift shops and the wardrobes of Mary-Kate and Ashely. I'm pretty sure there were a few fleecy spring jackets hanging from the tree too. Most of them were in good enough condition to be a few years old at the most, if not new. The coats were torn up as if somebody had taken a knife to them, and I can clearly remember seeing brown stains bordering the perimeter of the torn sections, which at the time reminded me of dried apple sauce but through the years or half forgetting and embellishing has come to resemble dried blood. It could have been anything for all I know and remember, my dad seemed pretty upset when I reminded him about that years later. Some of the coats were adult sizes, some seemed to be children's.

My dad turned to me and quietly told me to run. We ran back to the car, taking what seemed like a terribly long time to find our way back there in the failing afternoon light. We drove home silently, contemplating what we saw. I was told never to tell my mother, and to this day still haven't.

At the time, he told me he was going to tell the police, but when I asked him about it a few years ago he seemed uncomfortable talking about it, so I dropped it. I still don't know what we saw, I couldn't even give any real location of the forest. I grew up in Oxford County, it's likely it happened somewhere in there or one of the surrounding counties. If I ever figure out where it was, I'd love to go back and have a second look. I dream about the forest about once a month.