A Reddit user said he was hunting a piece of land in central Wisconsin that had once belonged to his family before it was donated to the DNR and turned into public land decades earlier. He wrote that it was the first week of rifle season and he was sitting over a little clearing just about ready to call it a night when he suddenly heard someone screaming for help about 125 to 150 yards away. Because he knew an older guy hunted that area, his first thought was that the man had fallen out of his tree stand.
According to the post, he got up right away and headed toward the sound. But when he made it back to the parking spot, there were no vehicles there at all. That was the first thing that made the situation feel wrong. He still did not leave. Instead, he ran down into the area and started looking for the person he thought had been yelling. He wrote that he searched for around 20 minutes, calling out and trying to find whoever had screamed.
What bothered him most was what he did not find. He said it had snowed earlier that morning, and when he looked around, he could not see any footprints except his own. No signs that somebody had run through there, no sign of another hunter, and no clue where the scream had come from. After spending that time searching and coming up with nothing, he said he left in a hurry because he had no idea what he had actually heard.
The comments filled in the next piece. Several people immediately suggested that what he heard may have been a cougar. One reply said mountain lion screams are soul-rattling and can sound exactly like a person in trouble. The original poster answered that there had been a cougar sighting a few miles north of where he was and said maybe that was the first one he had ever heard. Other commenters jumped in saying the first time they heard one, they also thought it sounded like a woman being murdered in the woods.
So the story he told was pretty simple and unsettling. He was finishing a hunt near dusk, heard someone screaming for help in the woods, assumed another hunter had been hurt, and went looking. But when he got to the parking area there were no cars, and when he searched the snow, there were no tracks besides his own. After about 20 minutes of calling out and finding nothing, he headed out still not fully sure whether he had heard a person at all.
What do you think — if you heard a scream like that near dark and then found no cars and no tracks, would you keep searching, or get out of there and call it in?
Original Reddit post: Anyone ever seen anything while in the woods hunting that they were afraid to tell someone about for fear of being called crazy?
