This creepy geocaching story starts with an old ammo can on a ridge in western North Carolina and a paper log that should have been ordinary. Every name in that log was different, but every line was written by the same hand, and the last one was written for me.
I’ve been geocaching for six years. My username is TinCanCurtis. I need you to know that before I tell you about the log.
I’m an HVAC tech out of Weaverville, North Carolina. Most of my days off go to the hobby. If you don’t know it, people hide containers in the woods and post the coordinates online. You hike out, find it, sign the paper log inside, then log it on the app.
Every serious cacher has a grid. Difficulty on one side, terrain on the other. You try to fill every square. In October of last year, I had one square left.
It was a cache called Ridge Reader, up in Pisgah National Forest. Difficulty four, terrain four and a half. Placed in 2014. The last online log was from 2019.
Six years with nobody logging it. That happens with the hard ones. I figured it was soggy or gone, and I’d hike out just to say I tried.
I parked at a gated forest road around nine in the morning. There was one other car at the pull-off. An old green Subaru wagon with pine needles piled up in the wipers. A bow hunter, I figured. It was the season.
The hike took a little over three hours. Logging road, then a creek, then a climb with no trail at all. My GPS bounced around under the trees.
The cache was right where the description said. Under a split boulder near the top of the ridge. A green ammo can, the old metal kind. Rusty latch. Dry inside.
I was honestly thrilled. Three hours of climbing, six years since anybody had logged it, and there it was. I took a picture of it before I opened it.
Inside the Creepy Geocaching Logbook
Inside there was a pencil, a couple of trade trinkets, and a small spiral notebook in a freezer bag. I sat on the rock and opened the book to read the history. That’s half the fun. You see who came before you.
The first page was the owner. “Placed 6/2/2014. Enjoy the view. quietfern.”
Then the finds started.
“7/19/2014. TFTC, great hike. ScoutDadMike.”
“9/3/2015. Found it with my dog. Ridgeback_Rita.”
“5/22/2017. Brutal climb, worth it. Hollis_and_June.”
Eleven names over eleven years. Different people. Different seasons.
Same handwriting.
I didn’t see it right away. I want to be clear about that. I’d read four or five entries before I noticed. The little loop on every lowercase g. The way every seven had a line through the middle. The slant.
I told myself it was the owner. Sometimes an owner copies the old log into a fresh book when the first one gets wet. People do that.
Except the online logs stopped in 2019. The paper ones kept going.
“4/8/2021. TFTC. Wandering_Wes.”
“8/30/2023. First find of the season. cairn_kid.”
Same g. Same crossed sevens.
The last entry was at the bottom of the page. The pencil was darker there. Fresh.
“10/18/2025. Welcome, TinCanCurtis.”
That was the date. That day.
I read it maybe five times. I remember thinking, okay, somebody saw my post. The night before, I’d written in a regional caching group that I was going for Ridge Reader in the morning. Somebody got up here first to mess with me. That’s the kind of joke a cacher would play.
It was 3:41 in the afternoon. I know because I checked the date on my GPS, like it might have changed.
When the Woods Went Quiet
That’s when I noticed the woods.
There had been birds the whole climb. Chickadees. A woodpecker somewhere below me. Wind in the tops of the trees.
All of it was gone.
Not quiet. Gone. Like a radio somebody switched off.
I could smell pencil shavings. I looked down. There were fresh curls of wood in the bottom of the ammo can. Pale. Dry. Somebody had sharpened that pencil up here, and not long ago.
I didn’t sign the log.
I put the book back in the bag, closed the can, and slid it under the boulder the way I found it. I don’t know why I was so careful about it. It felt important not to be rude.
Then I walked down. I didn’t run. I told myself running was how you broke an ankle.
Twice on the way down, I heard what sounded like someone stepping on a stick behind me, up the slope. Both times I stopped. Both times nothing. Deer, I told myself. Deer do that.
It took me under two hours to get back to the gate. My knees were wrecked for a week.
The green Subaru was gone.
I hadn’t passed anyone. There’s one road in. I’d been on it or beside it the whole way back. I stood there a while and looked at the empty gravel where it had been parked. The needles from its wipers were still lying in a little pile on the ground.
At home I did what any cacher would do. I looked up the names.
ScoutDadMike’s account had been inactive since July 2014. His last log anywhere was a “did not find” on a different cache, two days before the date in the paper book.
Ridgeback_Rita stopped logging in September 2015.
Hollis_and_June, May 2017.
I went through all eleven. Every one of them stopped geocaching within a week of the date somebody wrote their name in that book. Two of the profiles had comments from other cachers on them. The kind people leave when someone doesn’t come back.
I don’t know what happened to any of them. I didn’t dig further. I fix heat pumps. I’m not a detective.
I did email the regional reviewer. I said the cache had a strange log and maybe should be archived. He wrote back a week later. Polite. He said he’d disabled the listing and tried to reach the owner.
Then one more line at the bottom.
“Odd thing. quietfern’s account shows a login on October 18th. First one in years.”
The cache is archived now. It doesn’t show on the map.
On my profile, Ridge Reader still shows as unfound. My grid still has one empty square.
I’m keeping it that way. Because I never signed that book.
And somebody up there was waiting to see if I would.
Have a creepy geocaching story of your own?
Have you ever found something on the trail that felt like it was left for you? Tell us your creepy geocaching story, or any creepy hiking stories from deep in the woods, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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