A Reddit user said the problem was not just that somebody had wandered onto private land. He wrote that his family discovered a deer stand had actually been built on their property, and he made a point of saying the land was clearly posted with contact information. According to the post, this was not some confusing boundary line deep in the timber or some honest mistake where a hunter drifted over without realizing it. He said they knew who had done it and believed the whole thing was deliberate.
What made it worse, he said, was where the stand had been placed. The poster explained that his property already had established stands in the area, and the new one had been set up above them in a way that made those original stands unsafe to use while the trespass stand remained there. That detail changed the tone of the whole thread right away. This was not just somebody slipping across a line to hunt where he should not have been. It was a setup that, in the poster’s view, effectively interfered with their own safe use of their hunting ground.
He sounded less interested in revenge than in not making a bad situation worse. In the original post, he asked what steps they needed to take and said they wanted to handle it in a legally responsible way. In later comments, he added that the property line should have been easy to understand because the neighboring property ended at the wood line and the entire perimeter where the land met that side was clearly posted. That made the whole thing feel even more brazen.
As the comments started pouring in, plenty of people gave the sort of advice you would expect from hunters talking about trespassers in the woods. Some said to tear the stand down immediately. Some joked that a stand left on private property had just become a free stand. Others said that if the poster truly knew who was responsible, the safest move was to treat it as a trespassing issue and start documenting everything instead of marching over there and creating a confrontation.
That was really the fork in the road in the thread. One side leaned toward handling it quietly and directly, especially if the stand owner was a neighbor the family would still have to live beside after hunting season was over. The other side urged the poster to stay above board, collect evidence, and let law enforcement or a game warden deal with it so nobody ended up in a heated argument on a property line with firearms involved. One commenter said exactly that, warning that land disputes can get out of hand in a couple of seconds when tempers flare and both sides may be armed.
Several replies focused on proof. More than one commenter suggested setting up hidden cameras aimed at the stand to catch the trespasser using it, both to confirm identity and to support a report to police, the game commission, or a game warden. One person said the poster’s family might not want to interact with the individual at all without law enforcement present, both for safety and for the sake of having a neutral witness if the conversation went sideways.
The original poster seemed to lean toward that cautious approach. In one reply, after somebody said it was time to file a police report if they knew who was responsible, he answered that it sounded like the prudent move. In another comment, when somebody suggested putting up a camera and waiting for proof, he responded that there was a clear path from the stand right to the suspected person’s house, but he still understood the point. He also added that the family could not use their own stands until the issue was resolved, which made the whole problem feel immediate instead of theoretical.
One of the more interesting parts of the thread was how many hunters clearly recognized the behavior as different from ordinary opportunistic trespassing. A commenter pointed out that most people who knowingly hunt land they do not have permission to use tend to rely on climbers or portable ground blinds they can pack in and out quickly if they get caught. Building or leaving a fixed stand behind on posted land struck people as unusually bold. That fed the sense that the poster was dealing with somebody who either felt entitled to the spot or assumed there would be no real consequences.
That is probably why the story stuck. It was not just about a hunter stepping where he should not have stepped. It was about somebody physically planting a stand on posted private property, putting it in a place that affected the landowners’ own hunting setup, and forcing them to decide whether to handle it neighbor to neighbor or turn it into a formal trespassing case. In that kind of situation, even before anybody says a word face to face, the line has already been crossed.
Original Reddit post: Deer stand found on private property
What do you think — if you found a stand like that on clearly posted land and knew exactly who put it there, would you pull it down first and ask questions later, or go straight to cameras, a report, and no direct contact at all?
