A Reddit user said one of the most unsettling nights he ever had in the woods happened during a wild boar hunt in southwest Oklahoma. According to his comment in the thread, he was sitting in a blind with one of the guides who had agreed to stay out with him through the middle of the night. He had hunted that same blind before and knew the layout well. There was a motion-activated green LED light mounted near a feeder about 75 yards in front of them, and behind the feeder was a steep levee for a lake, putting the top of the rise roughly 100 yards from the blind. They were surrounded by pasture, creek beds, thick brush, and scattered trees, sitting inside an enclosed plywood blind with their backs against one of the long walls.
He said a few hours into the sit, everything changed at once. The normal sounds of the woods just stopped. No owls, no mice, no cattle, no crickets, no bugs — nothing. He described it like someone had hit a mute button in the middle of a movie. He also made a point of saying he was an Army veteran who had spent plenty of time outdoors on bivouacs, guard duty, and hunts, so he was used to trusting his senses when something felt wrong. But he said he had never heard that level of silence in a wild place in his life.
Then the lights appeared. About 10 minutes after the woods went dead quiet, he started seeing little flashes out toward the levee past the feeder. At first he thought they were fireflies, but then he remembered it was early February and too cold for fireflies. He wrote that the flashes looked more like someone moving a flashlight around than anything natural. From the way he described it, they were not steady lights and they were not easy to explain away once he realized the season and temperature made bugs a bad answer.
He said the guide began coming apart. The man got disoriented enough that when they finally decided to leave, he started heading the wrong direction. The poster wrote that he grabbed his rifle and pack and went after him, and he believed that was the right call because the guide had the keys and was their only way out. He said he did everything he could to talk him down and get him moving back toward the truck instead of farther into the dark.
According to the story, they finally made it back to the vehicle, threw their gear in, and took off “like a bat outta hell,” nearly sliding off the dirt roads on the way back to the lodge. Once they got there, they drank whiskey and sat in the game room talking about what had happened until they were too exhausted to stay awake. The next day, the poster started researching the area and found that much of it had once been Indian land. The closest thing he could find that even sounded similar was local talk about “spook lights,” but he said those accounts did not really match what he had seen, because the lights people described were more constant, while these had flashed like a moving flashlight or orb in the dark.
The story he told was not about a boar charge or a missed shot. It was about sitting in a blind with a rifle in the middle of the night, hearing the entire woods go silent, watching unexplained lights flash over the levee, and then having to drag a panicking guide back toward the truck before they got turned around in the dark. By the time they reached the lodge, it sounded like they were both less worried about hogs than about whatever had made the night feel so wrong in the first place.
What do you think — if the woods suddenly went dead quiet during a midnight hunt and strange lights started flashing over the levee, would you stay put with the rifle and wait it out, or get out of there the second your guide started losing it?
Original Reddit post: What’s your terrifying hunting stories
