Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world really isn't out to get you. -Anonymous
Growing up living in the woods gave me some unforgettable experiences as a child. With only one other boy my age living nearby and no places to hang out with friends from school in a reasonable distance, the two of us would often spend our time exploring the woods, me usually following him only so I wouldn't get left behind. We would grab fallen fronds from Sable Palm trees, break off the leaves with a quick stomp, and use the sticks as “machetes” to cut our way through the seas of palmetto bushes, looking for interesting things people would dump out there. Chain-link fences, tires, truck hoods, and even a paddle boat were among the trash that we would find. If it wasn't in too bad of shape (and there weren't snakes living inside) we would find a way to salvage it and drag it to our makeshift fort.
Our “Fort” was a large oak tree near John's house. It was our base and when we were going to play we always went there first to get our supplies. There were stacks of tires that we piled next to the trunk so we could climb up into the tree. Between branches we tied down sections of chain-link fences that we covered with pine needles to make hammocks, and at the top of the tree was where we kept the best stuff. Up there we kept rope for dragging heavy things around and pulling down dead trees, our sturdiest stick-swords, and camouflage army gear John had gotten from his dad.
One day when I was twelve (John is about a year younger than me), the two of us decided that we were going to camp out overnight in the fort. That whole day we spent preparing things. We searched the woods for dead logs and dragged them to the fort and while John used his dad's axe to try and chop them up, I tried hanging tarp over the hammocks. When night fell we had a fire lit up near the tree and were cooking hot dogs and jiffy pop over it.
I sat around that campfire with him for a few hours talking about nonsense and listening to him tell scary stories as well as adding the occasional extra log and kindling to the flames to keep them burning. Our preparation wasn't as good as we thought though and our last log was almost burnt out long before we were ready to go to sleep so we grabbed a couple of flashlights and went looking for more wood to burn.
I was very scared of going around the woods at night but John was braver than me and led the way. I grabbed one of my sticks though, just in case, as we walked into the woods looking for logs we might have missed earlier.
“You know, I got another good story,” John started saying as we scanned the ground with our flashlights, “There were a couple of kids camping out in the woods around this area. While they were sitting around their campfire a strong wind suddenly blew their fire right out making it go pitch black.”
“Stop it!” I snapped at John while he clicked his flashlight on and off repeatedly.
“One of them fumbled around on the ground looking for the lighter when the other one suddenly let out a loud blood-curdling scream. The first kid had found his lighter and clicked it on, looking up to see a pair of blood red glowing eyes from a shadowy monster hanging from a branch right above him. Before he could even scream, the monster had grabbed him and pulled him into the tree and the last anyone heard of him was the crunching of his bones while the thing ate him!” … I nearly pissed my pants.
As we kept going deeper into the woods I was trembling, looking up into the trees every few seconds to make sure there weren't any monsters with red eyes up there. When we finally found a good log after almost ten minutes it took the both of us to carry it back. Me in the front, holding my flashlight in my mouth, and John carrying it from behind.
Even after we got back to the camp, split the log in half, and thrown the pieces into the fire, John insisted we go back out to get another one. I went with him grudgingly, this time without a weapon since it got in the way trying to carry back the first log. This time we went searching in a different direction but I still kept looking up into the trees for monsters. After a few more minutes out there we found another good piece of wood for the fire which John was able to carry by himself while I followed him with the flashlights.
As we were walking back to camp, I suddenly stopped, petrified, with one flashlight pointed in front of us and the other up in the trees. John noticed that I had stopped and his eyes followed to where the flashlight was pointed at. Up in a large pine tree only thirty feet away from us, my flashlight lit up the figure of a large tan Florida panther lying on one of the lower branches, staring at us. The two of us both stood there frozen for a few seconds staring back at it until we finally dropped the log and all the sticks we had and ran away screaming. We ran as fast as we could straight past our campsite at the fort, all the way to our homes.
By the time I got to my house I was sweating like crazy and crying from terror. I let myself inside and went to my room to hide under my covers but was too afraid to get in bed once I realized that my bed was right up against my window. When my parents woke up the next morning they noticed that I had come home already and saw that overnight I had completely rearranged my room around with my bed in the corner furthest from the window.
That next day John and I met up again at the fort to clean up and found all the food we had left behind eaten by raccoons and the sheets and pillows we put on our hammocks completely soaked. The only good thing from the encounter that night was missing a storm that hit only an hour after we ran home but since that night I haven't slept outside again or even gone out into the woods in the dark. It was the second most terrifying night of my life and I'll never forget it.
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