A Reddit user said he discovered that someone had put a tree stand on his property without permission, and the situation got complicated fast. According to the post, the stand was not just sitting near the property line in a way that could maybe be explained away. It had been put on his land, and the thread made clear that the person who set it there may also have damaged a fence in the process.
He went to Reddit trying to figure out what he could legally do next. The question was not only how to deal with a trespasser, but whether taking the stand down himself could create a separate problem. From the way the thread unfolded, that was the real headache. Somebody else had crossed onto his property and put equipment there, but depending on the laws in that state, simply keeping or disposing of the stand could put the landowner in a bad position too.
A lot of the replies warned him not to assume that finding someone else’s gear on his land automatically made it his. Several people said that in some states, the trespasser could be guilty of trespass or property damage while the landowner could still get accused of theft if he just kept the stand. The advice in the comments mostly leaned toward taking it down carefully, documenting everything, and contacting a game warden, sheriff, or other local authority before turning it into a bigger argument. Some specifically said the safest move was to ask law enforcement whether they wanted to pick it up or whether they were okay with him holding it until the owner came looking for it.
The thread turned into a pretty practical discussion about how messy these situations can get. On paper, it sounds simple: someone put a stand on land that was not theirs. But once the landowner is standing there looking at the stand, the fence damage, and the property line, the next step is not always as clean as people think. He still has to decide whether to remove it, whether to leave it in place long enough for authorities to see it, and how to protect himself while dealing with someone who already proved willing to cross the line once.
The story itself was straightforward. A landowner found a stranger’s tree stand on his property, believed there had been fence damage involved, and then realized that even though the other person may have been clearly in the wrong, he still needed to be careful about what he did next. That left him stuck in the kind of situation a lot of property owners hate most: the trespass is obvious, but the cleanest response is not.
What do you think — if someone put a tree stand on your property and damaged the fence getting in, would you take it down immediately, or leave it in place until the game warden or sheriff saw it first?
Original Reddit post: Someone put a tree stand on my property
