A Reddit user said he owns about 70 acres of woods in Pennsylvania, and he made it clear this was not a case of a confusing boundary line or one stray hunter wandering over by mistake. According to his post, the whole property was clearly posted, and he said trespassing had become such a routine problem that every year he ended up kicking out five to 10 different people trying to hunt there anyway. He said he only allowed two other people, plus himself, to hunt the land, and all of them used climbers instead of leaving permanent setups behind.
That is why what he found on a scouting walk hit him so wrong. He wrote that he had gone out to check deer trails and look over the property before season, only to discover multiple ladder stands already set up throughout his woods. Not one stand. Multiple. The way he told it, this was not some small sign of pressure around the edges of the property. It was people moving right in, planting equipment, and acting like his ground was theirs to use.
In the post, he asked the question a lot of landowners would probably ask first: what exactly can you do with stands left behind by trespassers? He wanted to know if he could throw them out, keep them, or needed to handle them some other way under the law. The comments came in fast, and a lot of them had the same basic tone. People told him that if the stands were sitting on his land, then the hunters had effectively abandoned them there and he ought to take them down and treat them as his. One commenter even suggested taking the stand and leaving a note on the tree with a phone number so the owner could call if he wanted it back.
But the poster did not seem eager to just start yanking gear and turn the whole thing into a bigger mess. In one reply, he said he was going to call the game warden first, and if that went nowhere, then he would consider taking the stands down himself. That felt like an important detail in the thread because it showed where his head was. He was angry, clearly, but he was still trying to stay on the right side of the line and not create a fresh problem while dealing with the old one.
The more he answered people, the clearer it became that this was not new. In a later comment, he said he had owned the property for eight years and the same problem still kept coming back. He wrote that some of the trespassers used the exact same excuse every time, saying the previous owner had once told them they could hunt there. His answer never changed: he was the current owner, and they were not allowed to be there. He also said the people setting up on the land often trashed the area, leaving beer cans and garbage behind where they hunted.
That added another layer to the story. This was not only about somebody sneaking in for a sit and slipping back out before daylight. According to the poster, it had become an ongoing pattern of people treating clearly posted private land like a leftover privilege that still belonged to them, even years after ownership had changed. Some commenters told him that once that kind of behavior repeats over and over, the time for gentle reminders is long gone. A few said he should simply start calling the game warden or state police the second he spotted anyone out there instead of talking first.
There was also a strong warning running through the comments not to handle everything alone if he did not have to. One person said it is always to a landowner’s advantage to get game wardens involved because they carry real authority and can deal with trespassers without the conflict turning personal. That same commenter added a story about vindictive hunters placing bait near someone’s stands and then reporting the property owner for hunting over bait, which gives you a pretty good feel for how ugly some of these disputes can get once bad blood sets in. Others suggested putting cameras up high near the stands so the landowner could catch whoever came back for them.
The thread eventually got an update, and that was the part that pushed the story from a simple trespass complaint into something a little more satisfying for the landowner. He edited the original post to say he had gotten in touch with the local game warden, and the warden was coming out the following week to check everything with him. He also said there were other trespassing and hunting-related issues the warden was going to look into while he was there. That update gave the whole thing a different tone. It was no longer just a guy venting online about strangers leaving gear in his woods. It had reached the point where a state officer was stepping in to look over the property and deal with the pattern directly.
The interesting thing about the thread is that almost nobody seemed shocked by the problem itself. The comments read more like hunters comparing notes on how common this kind of thing can be when posted land sits near people who have gotten used to helping themselves. What stood out was the scale of it and how worn down the landowner sounded after years of repeating himself. By the end, the game warden’s involvement felt less like an overreaction and more like what happens when somebody has asked nicely enough times and keeps finding more stands in the trees anyway.
Original Reddit post: the Reddit thread.
What do you think — if you kept finding stands on your posted ground year after year, would you deal with the hunters face to face one last time, or skip the warning completely and let the game warden handle it from there?
