A Reddit user said a buddy called him after shooting a doe that had run into the woods, asking for another set of eyes to help track it. By the time he got to the farm, it was already dark, so the two of them headed out across the field toward the tree line to pick up the trail. They were still about 200 yards from the woods when he noticed what looked like a porch light glowing through the trees. He asked his friend how far the nearest house was, and his friend told him there were no houses there at all.
He pointed the light out to his buddy, and both of them stood there trying to make sense of it. From where they were standing, the light looked like it might be around 100 yards into the woods, but it was hard to judge because there was nothing near it to compare it to. Then they realized it was moving toward them. He said it was not moving the way a person carrying a flashlight or headlamp would move. There was no side-to-side sweep, no bobbing up and down, and it appeared to be about eight feet off the ground. He added that the woods there had been logged years earlier, so the underbrush was extremely thick, full of old skidder ruts and rough ground.
The light kept coming and, in his words, moved “smooth as butter” and completely silently through the woods. When it finally reached the edge of the field, it stopped for a moment. Then it moved to the left from their perspective for about 50 yards, stopped again, rose about 15 feet, dropped back down, and then rose again. He turned to his friend and asked if they should get closer to it. His friend answered immediately with one word: “Why??”
Right when his friend said that, the light seemed to focus on them. He wrote that the entire area around them suddenly lit up with a dim glow, almost like there was a full moon directly overhead, except there was no moon in the sky that night. That was the moment both of them stopped trying to figure it out and decided to leave. He said they turned around and ran back across the field.
They went back the next morning to recover the deer and talked again about what they had seen, but neither of them had an explanation. Weeks later, he told his dad about it. His dad mentioned it to a neighboring landowner, and the man got serious and said he had seen the same light several times before but had never told anyone because he thought people would think he was crazy. The hunter said he knew it was not a person with a flashlight and did not believe it was a drone. After a lot of research, the closest thing he found was Native American folklore about orbs of light that protect and guide white-tailed deer, and he said he still wonders whether that was what they saw that night.
What do you think — if you were walking out to track a doe after dark and saw a light gliding silently through thick woods toward you eight feet off the ground, would you have gone closer to figure it out, or run the second it lit up the field around you?
Original Reddit post: What are some of your hunting horror stories?
