The Creepiest Things Found in the Woods

The woods are a creepy place where lots of strange and mysterious things happen. Let's find out about some of the creepiest things found in the woods!

October 14, 2022・

11 min read

There are many things that you expect to find as you’re walking through the woods: trees, bushes, rocks, birds, fallen leaves, and maybe a deer if you’re really lucky. But the people in this article got the shock of their lives.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll be taking someone with me next time I go into the woods from now on. You probably will too, once you get to the end of this list of scary things seen in the woods.

10. The Bunker

Somewhere in the woods of Northern Germany, a mysterious bunker was discovered by a couple who first noticed some pipes sticking out of the ground. As they explored the strange place, they found medical gloves, flooded corridors, weird machinery, and heavy metal doors that had been violently ripped from their hinges.

What happened down in this bunker? What was it used for? Was there some type of experiment that got loose before it was abandoned?

The authorities have reportedly buried the entrance since the emergence of photographs of the place, adding to the mystery and preventing further exploration of this creepy location. But the truth about it is perhaps even more unsettling: it’s most likely an old German or Soviet control bunker from the war.

The pipes up top are simply for drawing in air. Internal machinery was designed to filter air and water for the occupants. Many people online also suggested that the doors were removed when the bunker was decommissioned to prevent people from getting trapped.

9. The Mysterious Man

In nearby Switzerland, people are dealing with a different type of mystery in the woods, a man dressed in a military outfit, cape, and gas mask. He was first spotted around 10 years ago. Despite this and the fact that he supposedly takes that same path every day, nobody knows anything about him and only one picture of him exists.

Although he’s never shown any aggression towards anyone that’s had the misfortune of encountering him, he continues to strike fear into nearby residents who just want to know who he is and why he chooses to walk around like that.

He’s over 6 feet or nearly 2 meters tall and may not even be a man. Theories range from it being someone with a strange skin condition to a hermit obsessed with the end of the world. The only thing that could be creepier is a clown walking around in the woods.

But that would never happen, right? Wrong. Reports have been made by some kids who said a clown was inviting them to follow them out into the woods in a small town in South Carolina.

But surely it was just a story, right? There aren’t really creepy clowns walking around out there randomly... right? Well, take a look at the video below.

8. The Colt Family

All families are messed up, yet they love each other, but the Colt family took those two qualities to a whole new level. When this clan was tracked down in the woods of Australia, 38 people were found, all of them the products of incest. Women were having children with their full brothers or fathers for 4 generations.

As you may have already guessed, a number of these kids had deformities. Many of them also couldn’t speak properly and instead spoke in a strange language of their own invention. They lived on an isolated farm and had no running water nor access to the outside world. It was a wonder how they survived living in such conditions.

The reason the police knew to look for them is pretty creepy on its own and sums up just how seriously messed up this family was. A local kid overheard a girl in the woods talking about how her older sister was pregnant but they didn’t know which of their brothers was the father.

I feel really bad for the family counselor that had to sort things out with these poor kids. After all, they were living in total isolation from the rest of the world and grew up thinking that this was totally normal.

7. Dead Animals

When someone finds a dead animal in the woods, they typically have one of three reactions: it’s cool, disgusting, or fascinating. But what if you found a pile of more than 250 dead animals out in the woods? A pile of dogs, cats, rats, mice, deer, foxes, racoons, and an exotic bird?

Yet, that’s just what was found in the woods in Virginia. What may have been even creepier is that many of the dogs and cats still had IV catheters in their legs which indicated that they had been treated at a veterinary hospital before their demise.

So how did they end up in the woods? Long story short, a company that was supposed to cremate all of these animals didn’t do their job. Instead, they dumped them in the woods. It has yet to be revealed to the public exactly why they did that, but I can’t think of a single good reason to do such a thing.

6. Breathing Earth

When they say that the earth is alive, they don’t mean that it’s literally alive and breathing, yet it seems like that’s exactly what a man in Canada seemed to have caught on film. He posted the creepy footage below in a Facebook group but nobody was able to figure out exactly what was happening in the video.

One theory is that it’s fungus making the earth move or else a shallow root system of the trees that’s moving with the wind. But no one knows for sure. Carnivorous trees have been mentioned in folklore for many years, but the truth is often stranger than fiction, and myths are often rooted in reality.

5. The Mysterious Cabin

While out marking trees on a nature preserve, a Californian worker stumbled across something unexpected. It was a cabin built from plywood that was carefully covered in plastic sheeting, leaves and branches, to protect it from the elements and keep it hidden.

It was so well hidden, in fact, that if you were more than 100 feet away from it, you couldn’t see it at all. Inside the cabin were a small living room and kitchen, complete with a small library and plenty of canned foods and spices.

There was a bench, a rocking chair, a wood-burning stove, and a typewriter all neatly arranged in the small space. In a raised loft area was a bed. Clearly, someone was living here even though there weren’t any signs of travel to and from the cabin in the surrounding woods.

The authorities were called in, and since it’s illegal to live on public property, they put up a notice giving the owner a few days to vacate. But, when they returned when the time was up, they were astonished. The cabin was gone. Not just the things inside, but the whole cabin itself.

Once again, there were no signs of travel which left everyone wondering how on earth the owner managed to carry these large pieces of wood and the heavy stove through the woods completely undetected.

The only thing remaining that let the authorities know that someone had been there was a mark on the ground. It was the international symbol for squatters.

4. A Gravestone

There have been plenty of incidences of graveyards or individual graves being found in the woods. Sometimes, these were forgotten graveyards that become overrun by nature while other times, an individual may have been buried far from the churchyard for whatever reason.

But one incident stands out as odd because while the body lay peacefully in the cemetery where it belonged, the original gravestone had somehow ended up in the woods. A hiker who goes by the name of 'River Wolf' found it, and by doing so revived the sad story of the woman to who it belonged.

Her real name was unknown, but she went by Marie Holmes while she was in Santa Cruz, California. She had left behind a young daughter as she traveled west. It was believed to be because Marie was suffering from tuberculosis.

She ended up working as a prostitute at a brothel there, and when her sorrow got the best of her, she took her own life. She was buried in the churchyard and her headstone was paid for by the other women at the brothel.

Years later, it was replaced as the curators believed it to have been destroyed by vandals. That is, until River Wolf found it out in the woods, still in perfect condition despite being so far from its home. To this day, nobody knows why it was moved or who was responsible.

3. Tongues Nailed to Trees

It’s common to see things like posters nailed to trees, but what about tongues? Well, that’s exactly what happened in Brooklyn, New York when visitors to Prospect Park found not one but fifteen cow tongues nailed to trees along a path winding through the woods.

If these huge fleshy tongues fastened to tree trunks with nails weren’t creepy enough, the likely reason behind it will make your flesh crawl: cow tongues are actually part of rituals in several different cults. By nailing them to trees, someone was trying to silence their enemies.

That just leaves us with a few questions: who performed this ritual and who were their “enemies” that they were trying to silence? Who has bovine enemies?

2. Explosives

Most of the things you can pick up from the woods are relatively innocuous. At the very least, they won’t kill you. That wasn’t the case with a construction worker in Arkansas though.

He found a live landmine from the civil war while working. He first thought it was a cannonball, so he tossed it into the back of his truck.

It wasn’t until he got home and was investigating it further that he realized what he had. He immediately called in the police who sent out a bomb squad and the air force. The entire neighborhood ended up being evacuated just to be safe while the mine was safely removed. Luckily, nobody was hurt.

In another case of picking things up from the woods, this next finder was not so lucky. Many people put motion-sensing cameras in the forest to capture images of wildlife. However, these cameras are expensive but easily stolen, so one man took protecting his belongings a little too seriously and rigged his cameras to explode when tampered with.

When a man came across one such camera lying on the trail, he picked it up and gave it to a friend. But, when his friend inserted the batteries, it exploded, and he ended up losing his fingers.

What may be most terrifying about this is that the man responsible was killed when he fought with the police officers that went to arrest him, so there’s no way of knowing if he’s got more booby-trapped cameras out there.

Before I reveal the number one creepiest thing found in the woods, here are a few honorable mentions! A beat-up baby doll head all on its own. There was nothing else nearby that suggested where it possibly could have come from.

Then, someone found an abandoned camp site that was made up of a sleeping bag, some food, and a teddy bear.

And finally, a really creepy scene: duct tape and bloody clothes in a shelter off the side of a hiking trail.

Now, onto our top pick…

1. Strange Statues

There’s no shortage of strange statues that can be found in the woods, including ones made to look like female body parts on wooded islands.

But since those statues apparently disappeared after their discovery, let’s take a look at the statues below. What exactly is that? And where did it come from? It looks like a bunch of aliens performing some type of ritual.

For better or for worse, the truth is a lot less exciting. This statue is one of many that can be found in the woods of Great Britain. It’s part of an art exhibition called 'The Sculpture Park' where you can also find a blue woman holding an umbrella, a lone pair of wheels, and skeletons performing a number of different tasks.

If you went to the park on purpose, you’d probably enjoy most of the statues that were there. However, if you came across this place by accident, it would probably leave you creeped out, especially if you arrived at night.

I hope you were amazed, or scared, at these creepy things found in the woods. And, be on the guard the next time you walk in the woods. Thanks for reading.