Fill in the blank! Stole this from r/Michigan who stole it from r/westvirginia lol.

to me, these would be best as intro stories – Katie

The Alabama White Thang:

u/Latter-Ad-8139 commented: I experienced/heard what I was told was the Alabama White Thang back in the day (70's). I can hear it like it was yesterday. The look and expression on the grown ups faces sent me over the edge. I'll never forget that... Camping in Etowah County while everyone was getting back from fishing and cleaning up..what sounded like a very large dead tree came crashing from the side of a steep cliff/mountain. We (4 adults, 3 kids) were all standing looking in the direction of the crashing tree. Someone broke the silence "Wow".. just as he said that, a very loud scream that was so low you could feel it in your head and chest (was told it was part infrasound). It kinda felt like being in a car with lots of bass sound..kinda tingly. You know it's just one of those things that....I heard something that I've never heard again. I researched native animal sounds and nothing is even close to what we heard. The closest is a howler monkey but even that doesn't do this sound justice and I doubt we had escaped howler monkeys in north Alabama in the 70's. This feeling/sound worried the adult armed men that much that we packed and left. Besides the nervous chatter from the kids, the adults said nothing the whole trip home.

Backpacking the Sipsey:

u/mostlyallturtles commented: In 2003, a buddy and I were backpacking in the Sipsey and had set up camp in our favorite spot, way back off of a secondary trail. We were a pretty good ways back there, at least 7 or 8 miles from the nearest trailhead. It was early spring, cold out, and we hadn’t seen a soul on the trail. After supper/shooting the shit, went to sleep in our tent. Sometime around midnight it started to storm. Torrential rain, lightning, as a 17 year old in a tent the storm alone was scary.

Then we heard the anvil. It was a hard, repeated, and abrasive clang of steel on steel. Sounded just like a cartoon hammer on an anvil. Clear as day, over and over, every three to five seconds, and it echoed through those hills. It probably went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, and only during the storm. It was the scariest thing either of us have ever experienced. We poked around with headlamps after the storm cleared, but found nothing.
We were alone out there. And there’s nothing out there close enough or big enough to produce a sound that big. That we know of, at least.

creepy hospital rabbit hole:

u/yellowhammer commented: Honestly? Creeping around in Old Bryce Hospital late at night. That place had the most palpable “get the fuck away/out” vibes I’ve ever felt.

This did not happen to me, but I live in the area where it took place. The guy who told my friend this story was one of the guys who hung back and didnt see what happened. As far as I know this is not a made up story.

My friend and I were discussing the scary things we've seen in the woods, and he told me a story that happened to his friend.

So this guy was with 5 of his friends were spending a few days in a shelters hunting and trapping. They were not drunk but had a few beers to unwind one night. So one of them goes out to the outhouse to go to the bathroom and he swears that off into the woods he hears the faint sound of a drum beating. So he finishes in the outhouse and goes into the shelters and tells his friends to come check out this sound. So they all grab their rifles and walk out the ridge their shelters was on and down the hollow behind it and back up the other side. It was a pretty rocky area so the sound traveled far, and they could tell that just over the hill was where the sound was coming from. So 5 of them spread out about 50 feet apart and walk up to the top. They couldn't see down over because of all the laurel bushes around so 5 of them wait and one of them sneaked down through to see what it was. When he got there he stood and watched for about a 30 seconds to a minute before he turned around and went to his friends as fast as he could telling them he saw evil and they had to get the hell out of there right then. All he would tell them is he saw a bunch of naked men and women dancing around in a circle chanting something in a foreign language.

He never told them about everything he saw.

More context from comments:

This took place close to 7 springs ski resort. Close to the resort is where Westmoreland, Fayette, and Somerset county basically all come together and it was in that area where a few towns are close by. Theres alot of woods in that area that are totally off the grid as far as civilization goes.

Other rabbit holes mentioned:

• Normalville, Pennsylvania
• Hawkins Hollow, Pennsylvania
• the woods near Betty Knox Hollow, Pennsylvania

I’m from a region of Pennsylvania called well the Pennsylvania Wilds. Its a very rural and heavily forested place covering about a quarter of the state. I‘ve been here all my life. When I was a kid my one cousin once told me there were weird people lurking in these woods and that only came out at night. My other cousin said something similar she's from the same area also but she said they were part of a cult that wore weird masks. I looked into that later on and couldn't find any mention of a cult. So i always figured they were both teasing me.

Well that was until last year. I had just left the house for work and it was just after three AM when I saw something step into the woods. I slowed down thinking it was a deer but it wasn't. Now it was dark but the glow coming off the side of my headlights made things visible enough to make out the road the dirt on the side of the road along with the grass and the trees. So I could clearly see a good deal. Also should mention it all happened in just a few seconds three or four maybe five. But there in-between the trees I clearly saw a tall lengthy creepy man like thing waving at me. It was all the same light brownish gray color. I thought he was naked and i was about to stop and check on him because we were out in the rural basically and it was the middle of the night. But I changed my mind as soon as I saw its face. It had sunken black eyes and what I thought was a very unnaturally long smile that came out of its black eyes and stretched way too far down than it should have been able to. But could have been a nose instead. Needless to say once I saw his face I tore my eyes off of him and put them back on the road as I hit the gas. As I spead away I refuse to look back and began to wonder what the hell that thing was.

Once I was at work I convinced myself it was a weird looking dead tree. On my way home I stopped where I saw the thing hoping to find that Weird dead tree but there was nothing. Just an abandoned old overgrown roads that lead into the woods.

It took some doing but I just brushed it off as a weird trick of the light. It was more believable than the alternative well at least to me it was. Fast forward a few months to the end of fall and I was just relaxing at home listening to a paranormal Podcast about aliens called tall whites and the one story they shared was from the next county over from where I live. Natural my ears perked up. It was from a park ranger who saw the same damn thing about 20 years ago. There were some slight differences like he said it had small red eyes and said it had a long nose. But he shined a flashlight directly on the thing and got a way better look at it. So the red eyes was probably from the flashlight shining on the eyes. Like how some animals eye shine different colors when their hid by light at night.

After hearing that story I just sat there wondering how he saw the same damn thing if it was just a trick of the light and the only thing I can come up with is that it was real and that those stories my cousins told me might have been true and that they saw the same damn things. I have no idea if anyone else has see the same damn thing or not. I honestly can't bring myself to ask because of how unbelievable it was. So here I am sharing with yall. I had shared it with the Freaky Deaky paranormal Podcast not sure if they ever share it. Its not a bad show.

As a child / young teen, I lived a very strange situation in the woods. I am not sure if this encounter may have been some kind of entity, or perhaps something different. I hope someone can give me more information about what happened to me and my friend.

I (F) was around 12 years old at the time and one of my best friends (let's call him Alex) must have been 10. Alex's father had purchased a large amount of forested land around 100km away from the city we lived in (Montreal, Canada). It was all forest when Alex's family acquired it; they cleared a little patch to build a house, and the rest was pure, unadulterated forest. Their land was cut in two by a dirt road that, if you followed it for several kilometers, let to a few houses. And their land was very different depending on which side of the dirt road you looked.

On the right side (where their house was), the forest was light and luminous - or at least it felt that way. It was not too dense, with little rolling hills. A lovely place to play.

On the left side of the road, though it was another story. First, there was a deep ditch, perhaps 2 meters deep, which then became a quite high and steep hill. Weirdly enough, all along the long road, the ditch was full of car parts. A set of car wheels here, a door there, a steering wheel way over there, all old and overgrown with moss. And over the steep hill, the forest gave off a really bad vibe. It had lots of very tall, dark coniferous trees, with almost black trunks, and the place seemed somehow devoid of light or life. Climbing the hill (which we seldom were willing to do because of the creeps it gave us), there was some sort of swamp there. When we were there, there was this strange pressure, we sensed a kind of animal instinct that told us to leave this place. The strange atmosphere was spontaneously obvious to both me and Alex, and we playfully called that side of the road "demon's forest".

One weekend day, probably in 2001 or 2002, my family and I came to visit Alex's family. Bored by the adults, my friend and I decided to go and play in the forest. Alex's father told us to watch out; there was an animal that had been rummaging in their trash bin and causing other nuisances. He said it was a dog that looked somewhat like a Rottweiler that surely belong to someone living up the dirt road - he warned us that we shouldn't interact with the dog if we saw it, as it didn't look healthy, as far as he could tell, or something was weird about it. He said it somehow looked diseased or contagious, or had patches of fur missing - can't remember exactly.

And so we set out on our walk. It was autumn and the leaves were pretty and golden, many having already fallen to the ground; it was a calm, slightly overcast windless day. The air was very still and calm. Alex and I decided to walk along the dirt road, with the pleasant section of the forest to our right, and "demon's forest" to our left.

We chatted while following the road as it was rising up a slope. As usual, we were slightly creeped out going up the road because of the weird vibes of the woods to the left side, but we were challenging ourselves to be brave and trying to not really think about how unsettling it felt.

A good distance away from their home, when it was already well out of sight, I noticed the first strange thing of the day.

Out of the steep hill on left side of the road, there was a very large and dark pine tree hanging over the road. Somebody had attached a pink ribbon to one of the branches (which was already strange, since this was the territory of Alex's family, and they had no daughters, or other little girls likely to hang around, or other people who may be owners of pink ribbons who were likely to hang out on this deserted road). The strange thing was, the ribbon was flailing strongly in the wind - its loose ends were flapping almost horizontally.

The thing is - it was a completely windless day. There was no wind to speak of.

The ribbon was within my reach, so I even touched it as it was flailing. I even licked my finger and held it in the air to check if I could feel any wind or air current at all, as my dad had taught me. The air was perfectly still. Yet the ribbon failed. I mentioned it to my friend. He seemed distracted and was younger than me and sometimes didn't catch on to what I said, so I didn't press the matter.

We continued our climb.

We reached a place where the hill on the left side of the road had a gentler slope and began further away from the road. In fact, it looked as if the hill was kind of carved out in a way that would have made it easy for us to climb to get into "demon's forest". It almost seemed as if the hill was carved in a sloping half-circle, like in a theater, and the road we stood on would have been the stage. It gave us a very clear, treeless view of the hillside, full of golden and red fallen leaves. The trees began at the top of the hill, maybe 9 meters higher. We stopped to admire the view - Canadian autumns are a sight to behold.

Alex suddenly got really excited. He thought he heard something in the "demon forest" up the hill and he really wanted me to pay attention. He explained that there are wild cats in that forest, they had spotted them with his dad. One of them had reportedly had kittens - kittens being one of the most exciting things in the world for kids our age, getting us all riled up... but somehow, my hackles were up and I could really relax, even thinking about adorable wild kittens.
He actually thought he had heard the cat meow in the woods, up the hill, close by. (I heard nothing of the sort and thought he was inventing it.) He vehemently suggested that we try meowing at it to see if it would respond - maybe it would even bring its kittens along and we could see them and play with them, he said. I hadn't heard any sounds at all and didn't really like his idea of screaming meows into the creepy forest. What kind of wild cat would respond to human children, anyway? Wouldn't it be obvious that we are not cats by the sound of us? That seemed like a dumb idea to me.

Before I could try to talk him out of it, he loudly meowed into the forest.

To my utter shock, the forest meowed back.

Alex was delighted. He meowed again.

Something in the forest answered again.

I was actually shocked, this didn't make sense to me. And it creeped me out. But I suspended my disbelief to see what would happen.

He kept doing meowing over and over - for every one of his meows, there was one coming back in response from the woods. Something felt off to me. Feral or wild animals didn't behave that way, even at 12 years old I realized that. And it wasn't an echo; the "cat" did not bounce back any sound that we threw at it except meows, which it reciprocated immediately - and anyway, there were no hard rocky surfaces around off of which sound could bounce off, everything was covered in a soft layer of sound-dulling leaves.

Alex got even more excited, "Listen!! The cat is coming towards us, she's coming to see us with her kittens!" To my surprise, he was right. There was a rustle of dead leaves coming from above us, from above the slope in the creepy forest. It seemed like the rustling was getting closer to us.

But it was way off. Because cats are small and light, and careful with their steps. They don't make a ruckus when they walk through the woods. But here, the rustling leaves sound was extremely obvious, along with the meowing. And in fact, it sounded more like... steps. Like someone with two legs walking in the leaves. And it was getting closer to us. My alarm signals were starting to go off with the wrongness of it all, while my younger friend was oblivious. He was calling it more vehemently, noticing that it was coming towards us.

Then I realized what seemed so wrong: the sound was coming towards us... but there was nothing to be seen. Right in front of us we had the gently sloping hill, treeless and clearly visible - anything coming from the forest should have been plainly exposed to view.

There was nothing.

No source for the rustling sound, nothing moving.

"Oh her kittens are joining her! Listen, there are more sounds! They're coming to play with us!"

He was right. The walking sound seemed to have multiplied and now came from various directions at once. Ever getting closer, with nothing being visible.

Something was way off - I wanted to leave. But Alex was getting mad at me - the kittens were almost here and he wanted to see them, he insisted. At this point is was extremely tense and fight or flight was activating from the wrongness of it all. We were alone and quite exposed on this "theater stage" to... whatever was getting closer to us, which was, more and more obviously with every moment, decidedly NOT kittens. I was on the verge to force him go run home.

And then, suddenly, I heard a very loud panting sound.

Right at my feet.

During the first millisecond, I got only mildly surprised - we had a huge husky at home. I was used to it panting next to my feet.

But then, a sense of profound dread downed on me as I realized that, obviously, my dog was not here. And it must be another dog, a very big one by the sound of it. Right at my feet.

I panickingly look down, ready to jump away from the dog that somehow got extremely close to me, almost on me, without my noticing.

Only there is absolutely nothing at my feet.

But I still hear the loud, breathy panting sound coming from there.

I whirl around, all 360 degrees, screaming. Where is it coming from??! There is NOTHING at my feet, or anywhere around me!

There is NOTHING there. Yet the sound is clearly there.

As I whirl about in a frenzy, I look up the dirt road we were following.

Around 100 meters away, of the top of the slope, I see a lone dog standing.

It looks somewhat similar to a Rottweiler, but in very, very bad shape. Extremely unkempt, with patches of fur missing, shaggy and dirty as heck, with some skin exposed where the fur is missing. It looks down at us, too.

Obviously, there is no way that I could hear it panting at that distance - and the source of the sound is at my feet.

At that point, the "flight" instinct wins insime me. I have never run as desperately and as fast in my whole life - thank goodness it was all downhill. Alex kept pace right beside me, terrified.

We made it home in one piece. We didn't walk in these woods anymore.
 ****
 I came back to Alex's place several times in my life. I never wanted to walk in the woods again.
 We had amazing parties at his house as teens. I was often there rather drunk and having a great time. But I always had this very stressful sensation when I went out of his house, especially at night. When I slept over there, I had these extremely strange experiences where, when I woke up, I sensed as if "something" was there and was observing me. In my mid-awake state, I even saw... something, floating near the ceiling. It had the sensation thay it was not an immediate threat, though - it was...observing. (I am not sure thay whatever "this" is was related to what happened on the dirt road.)
 
 We never discussed what happened that day.
 
 As I researched it now, I see that this land is historically Algonquin land. (Though one source seemed to say Mohawk.)
 
 If anybody can help clarify what happened, I would be thankful.