A Reddit user said the whole thing started with a pretty normal favor between hunting buddies. According to his comment, a friend called and said he had shot a doe, but the deer had run into the woods and he wanted another set of eyes to help track it. So the poster grabbed his gear and headed over. By the time he got to the farm where his friend was hunting, it was already dark, and the two of them started out across the field toward the tree line to pick up the track.
He said they were still roughly 200 yards from the woods when he noticed what looked like a porch light glowing through the trees. The first thing he did was ask his buddy how far the nearest house was and what other houses were around that section of the property. His friend told him there were no houses there at all. At first he figured his buddy was mistaken, so he pointed the light out to him. Instead of clearing it up, that made things worse, because his buddy looked just as confused as he was. The light appeared to be somewhere around 100 yards into the woods, but there was nothing in that direction that should have been lighting up like that.
Then the light started moving.
He wrote that it was not moving the way a person with a flashlight or headlamp moves through the woods. There was no side-to-side sweep, no bobbing up and down with footsteps, nothing that looked human at all. It was gliding toward them, smooth and silent, and he estimated it was about eight feet off the ground. What made that harder to explain was the terrain. He said the area had been logged years earlier, so the underbrush was thick, old skidder ruts cut through the woods, and it was not the kind of place where anybody could walk through easily, much less move cleanly and silently with a steady light floating that high.
According to the story, when the light reached the field edge it stopped for a moment. Then it moved left from their perspective for about 50 yards, stopped again, rose about 15 feet, dropped back down, and then rose again. He said that was the point where both of them knew they were not looking at something simple. He even asked his friend whether they should get closer to it, which he admitted later was probably just curiosity talking. His buddy’s answer was immediate: “Why??”
And that was when the whole thing got even stranger.
He wrote that right after his buddy said that, it was as if the light suddenly focused on them. Then the entire area around them 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. From the way he told it, that was the moment when curiosity died and the need to get out took over. The two of them turned and ran back across the field.
They went back the next morning to retrieve the deer and talked again about what they had seen, but neither one had a good explanation. The story stayed strange enough that the poster eventually told his dad about it. His dad mentioned it to a neighboring landowner, and the reaction surprised him. According to the poster, the man got very 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 either. After a lot of research, the only thing he found that even felt close was Native folklore about lights that guide and protect white-tailed deer, and he ended up wondering if maybe that was why the light seemed to lead them out there in the first place.
What do you think — if you were walking out to track a doe after dark and saw a light gliding silently through thick timber 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?
