Every deer camp has its scary hunting stories. Most of them are about getting lost, or a bear, or a buck that charged somebody’s uncle in 1974. Mine is about a second tree stand that showed up across the hollow from mine, facing my stand instead of the deer trail, and moving a little closer every weekend. This is one of those horror hunting stories you only tell once the gear is put away.
I’ve hunted the same piece of state game land in north-central Pennsylvania for twenty years. My brother Kyle and I hunt it together. We have a hollow we like, about a mile in from the parking area, with a creek at the bottom and a deer trail along the bench above it. My stand is a ladder stand on a big red oak on one side. Kyle’s is a climber he carries in, usually a couple hundred yards up the ridge.
We talk on cheap handheld radios. Channel 7, privacy code 12. We’ve used the same channel since we were teenagers.
In November of 2022, the week before rifle season opened, I stopped at a sporting goods store in Coudersport to buy a new battery pack for my radio. An older guy at the counter was buying the same kind. He smiled at me and said, “What channel you boys run on?”
I told him. Seven, code twelve. It’s not a secret. Hunters share that kind of thing all the time.
He nodded and said, “Good channel.”
Scary Hunting Stories Don’t Usually Start Like This
The weekend before opening day, Kyle and I walked in to check our stands and clear shooting lanes.
From my ladder stand, you look across the hollow to the other side. It’s maybe two hundred yards to the far ridge. That morning, there was a tree stand on the far side that hadn’t been there in twenty years.
A hang-on stand, the kind you strap high on a trunk. About eighteen feet up on a big hemlock. And the seat wasn’t facing the deer trail, or the creek, or anywhere a deer would come through.
It was facing my stand.
Kyle said it was some new guy who didn’t know what he was doing. On state game land, anybody can hunt anywhere. People put stands up in dumb places all the time. I told myself the same thing. I even laughed about it.
The next Saturday, we walked in again. The stand was gone from the hemlock.
It was on a big maple about forty yards closer. Same height. Same direction. Facing me.
That’s when I stopped laughing.
The third weekend was opening day. I walked in at 5:15 in the morning in the dark with my headlamp off, the way you’re supposed to. I climbed my stand by feel. At first light, around 6:40, I looked across the hollow.
The stand was on an ash tree on my side of the creek now. Maybe sixty yards away. And there was a man in it.
“You’re Sitting Too Still”
He was wearing full camo and an orange hat, the way you’re supposed to in rifle season. He had a rifle across his lap. He wasn’t looking at the deer trail. He was looking at me.
I gave him a little wave, the way hunters do. Just a hand up. It’s a courtesy. It means “I see you, you see me, nobody shoot anybody.”
He didn’t wave back.
He lifted his rifle and looked at me through the scope.
Not pointed at me exactly. A little to the side. But through the scope. I could see the glass catch the light. I could see the little black circle of the lens.
My whole body went cold and still. I couldn’t think. Then my radio clicked on my chest.
A man’s voice. Not Kyle. Low and calm.
“You’re sitting too still.”
I knew right away. Channel 7, code 12. The old man from the sporting goods store.
I keyed my radio and said, “Kyle.” Nothing. I said it again. Then I heard Kyle, faint, from up the ridge. “What? What’s going on?”
The voice came back on, over the top of him. “Deer don’t sit still like that. Only things that know they’re being looked at.”
The man in the ash tree lowered his rifle. He sat there. He didn’t move again.
I don’t remember deciding to climb down. I just did it. I unloaded my rifle on the stand so I wouldn’t do anything stupid, and I climbed down the ladder with my back to him, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Every rung, I waited to hear something.
Nothing.
When I got to the ground, I walked up the ridge toward Kyle without looking back. Kyle met me halfway. He’d heard the voice too. We walked out of those woods together, both of us with our radios turned off, and we didn’t say a word till we got to the truck.
I called the game warden from the parking lot.
What the Warden Found
The game warden met us there two hours later. A tall, quiet woman named Officer Brandt. We walked her back in. The stand was still on the ash tree. The man was gone.
She climbed up to look at it. In Pennsylvania, a tree stand on game land has to have the owner’s name and address or a customer ID on it. This one had a tag, but it was blank. Just a laminated card with nothing written on it.
She found something else, though. She took a picture and showed us when she climbed down.
On the wooden armrest of the seat, somebody had carved small notches with a knife. Neat little marks in a row. There were four of them.
She asked if we knew what they meant. We didn’t. She said she didn’t either. She took the stand down and put it in her truck as evidence.
A few weeks later, she called me. She said she’d asked around. In 2015 and again in 2019, hunters in two other counties reported almost the same thing. A stand that moved closer every weekend. A man in it who watched them instead of the deer. One of them heard a voice on his radio. Neither of them knew what channel he was on.
She said one of those hunters had quit hunting after that. She said she couldn’t get hold of the other one.
I asked her if that was four. The notches.
She said, “I’d rather not guess.”
I still hunt. I hunt from the ground now, in a blind, on private land where my cousin can see my truck from his kitchen window. Kyle and I changed our channel. We change it every year, and we don’t tell anybody.
Last November, I came out of the woods at dark and found a nylon tree stand strap looped around my truck’s side mirror. Buckled. Neat.
No note. Nobody around. Just the strap, swinging a little in the wind.
For more scary stories about the woods, read the creepy geocaching story about a logbook signed in one hand, our scary park ranger stories post about an empty tent in Idaho, or a 911 dispatcher horror story about a call from inside the building.
Share your scary hunting stories
Have you ever been in the woods and realized someone else was hunting too, just not for deer? Tell us your scary hunting stories, or any hunting horror stories from a tree stand or a deer camp, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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My Trail Cam Caught a Man Wearing My Dad’s Jacket