Ghost story time!
I went on a cross-California road trip a few years ago with a former bestie of mine, and we did not take very extensive precautions because we were like 20/21 at the time. Our idea of prep was taking a styrofoam cooler filled with sandwich meat and bottled coffee and hitting the road in an old beat up Saturn. Part of it was the impatience of youth, part of it was that my new (and first) job had given me more pocket money than I had ever had before (it was like $500 tops), and part of it was we just wanted to go trip in scenic locations and we never expected to get very far in the first place.
So our first stop was Sequoia national forest, and boy howdy was it a stop to remember. We drive all the way up this steep, narrow path with hardly any guard rails, and it takes an hour or two to reach our camping spot. We didn’t even reserve a spot, we just found one of those areas where anyone could stay if there was space available, I cannot stress how poorly thought out the whole thing was. So we get to the top, hop out of the car, get some fresh air, and start setting up our tent.
Not 15 minutes after we’ve gotten out of our car, my friend (lets call him H) is searching through his pockets and tells me that he can’t find the car keys. “Well they’ve gotta be around here somewhere” I say, so we rummage around the tend a bit, but we find nothing. We search the car, practically turning the thing inside out looking for this key-ring of his, but we find nothing. We look under the car, there’s nothing. We look through all our belongings, there’s NOTHING. The sun is starting to set, and we’re starting to worry, so we start digging through fucking piles of leaves and DIRT, and there’s NOT A TRACE of these keys anywhere. We were tired and sweaty and miserable frustrated, so we said fuck it and finished setting up the tent, preparing for an annoying morning the next day. I tried making some calls on a nearby payphone, to try and call AAA or a friend that I thought could help, but over and over I was met with silence (and a hefty $30 charge for EACH call. The payphone said 25 cents right there on the side, but it was a LIAR). Thoroughly defeated, I gave up and decided to call it a night.
I went and peed maybe 50 feet from the tent, and as i’m doing my business, the temperature drops a few degrees (and it was already a chilly night on a mountaintop), and SOMETHING rushes past behind me. It was big, like 7 ft big, but I couldn’t make out anything besides a big, dark blur in my peripheral vision. By the time I spin around, it’s vanished. Thinking I must be imagining things in the dark, maybe due to stress, I finish and hurry back to the tent. I don’t say anything to H, I just thought I was seeing things. But then H brings out his camera.
H was getting into photography at the time (he’s one of those types to pick up a hobby for a few weeks and jump to something else when it starts getting boring), so he’s been taking pics this whole time, trying to document our road trip and make memories. We’re taking selfies in the tent, and we’re looking through these photos and others he had taken at this spot we were staying, and there’s fucking ORBS in these pics. Not even blurry ones either, grayish-white orbs, as clear as day, clearer than us even, we floating all around the tent, around us, directly in our faces. We laugh a little about it, and then H goes outside to pee before we get some rest. I wait a few minutes, and when he gets back, he asks me, “Hey, when you were out here earlier, did you, like, see anything?” “What do you mean, exactly?” “Well, I was out there peeing and all, and I could’ve SWORN something passed by me. I couldn’t really see it in the dark, but it was BIG. And FAST.”
So I tell him what I saw too, and we both sat there, nervous, cold, the only light around us being this cheap electric lamp we brought. We try not to think about the implications of everything we’d seen/been through that night, and both agree to try and sleep it all off. Apparently I nodded off pretty quick ( I WAS exhausted), but H stayed up a bit, and in the morning, when we confirmed that neither of us had been killed in our sleep by ghosts or nature or WHATEVER, he told me that he heard things in the night. He could see shapes darting by, and he never knew what to make of it. But nothing came of it, in the end.
That morning we hiked ten miles down mountain to some lodge, where we spent hours trying to connect to AAA, and when we finally connected and called a tow truck, we marched ten miles BACK UP this steep mountain, meeting the tow truck only a half mile away from our campsite. We everything loaded in the car, then the car gets loaded onto the tow truck, and we start riding back down the mountain with the tow guy. We’re chatting it up a bit, and he tells us, “yeah, we get people calling us from up here all the time. Literally every other day, one of us has to drive up here and help someone having car issues”. At this point, me and H are certain there’s some kind of ghost bullshit happening here, but we both joke to each other that it was just paranoia, or a squirrel ran off with our keys, or SOMETHING. We make it all the way down the mountain, wait another hour with a locksmith to get new keys for the Saturn, and promptly drive to the nearest hotel for a nice, peaceful night, and a long, hot shower.
