One of the wildest stories in that Reddit thread came from a commenter who said he and his hunting partner had dealt with something eerily similar on their own property. According to his comment, they were not on public land and they were not freeloading through someone else’s woods. Their property had a long-standing easement that crossed five different properties and had been the only legal way in and out for more than 60 years. He described it as an obvious driveway that had existed for decades, not some shaky handshake route people could honestly pretend not to know about.
He wrote that the confrontation happened when they were leaving after a week of hunting. They drove out to the road and found the gate chained shut. The problem was not that somebody had simply locked a shared gate they had forgotten to unlock. According to him, the neighbor had put his own lock over their lock, chaining the whole thing shut in a way that was clearly meant to trap them inside. So now the two hunters were standing there at the only way out, looking at a gate that had been deliberately rigged to keep them from leaving their own property.
They decided they had no real choice. They broke the extra lock.
The second they did, the man appeared.
The commenter said the guy popped up behind their trucks with a rifle already pointed at them and immediately started screaming that he was going to shoot. From the way he told it, this was not some tense shouting match that slowly built toward the rifle coming out. The gun was already there when the man revealed himself. The two hunters ran to the far side of their trucks and used the vehicles as cover while trying to talk him down. He said the whole standoff lasted around 10 to 15 minutes, and instead of calming down, the man became more unhinged as it went on. He kept screaming that they were trespassing and that he was going to shoot them.
Eventually, the man backed up enough to let them leave.
That still was not the end of it. The commenter said they had to drive about half an hour before they got cell reception and could call the sheriff. By the time law enforcement got to the property, the armed neighbor had moved on from just holding them at rifle point. According to the story, deputies found him actively laying barbed-wire traps across their easement. He also admitted to pointing a rifle at “trespassers.” The sheriff took his gun, but the commenter said there was no immediate arrest because it happened during the COVID period and things were handled differently than they expected.
The legal mess dragged on from there. He wrote that local prosecutors did file charges, but after more than a year of delays and continuances from the man’s public defender, the case eventually fell apart. So after being trapped behind a chained gate, forced to cut their own way out, held at rifle point behind their trucks, and then learning the same guy was stringing barbed wire across their legal access road, they still did not get the criminal resolution they thought was coming.
He said they ultimately had to spend about $34,000 in legal fees to get a civil judge to rule that the man could not block their access over the completely established easement. That is the detail that really shows how bad it got. This was not just one ugly day in the woods with an unstable neighbor. It became a long legal war over the basic right to enter and leave their own hunting property without someone ambushing them with a rifle at the gate.
That is the full story he told in the Reddit thread: two hunters leaving after a week on their property, a gate secretly chained shut over their own lock, the decision to cut it off, and a man suddenly appearing behind their trucks with a rifle, screaming that he was going to shoot. Then came the drive for signal, the sheriff finding barbed-wire traps across the easement, the weapon being taken, the charges dragging and dying, and finally a civil court fight expensive enough to cost them tens of thousands just to keep using the same access road their property had relied on for more than 60 years.
What do you think — if someone chained the only gate out over your own lock and then appeared behind your truck with a rifle the second you cut it off, would you ever trust that easement to feel normal again?
Original Reddit post: Man trespasses onto leased property and holds hunter at gunpoint
