Witness stories / Campfire mode
Campfire stories
Real witness stories to read out loud around the fire, one at a time, in big red type on a black screen so nobody loses their night vision.
Shuffles all 231 stories. Swipe or use the arrows to move on.
The fire's down to coals and somebody says "tell a scary story". Tap the button above, hand your phone to whoever's brave enough and it'll pull up a random story from the site in big red text on a black screen. Red light doesn't wreck your night vision the way a white screen does (it's why hunters and stargazers use red headlamps) so you can still see the treeline when you look up. Whether that's a good thing is up to you.
Swipe or tap Next for another story, bump the text up with A+ if you're reading at arm's length, and your screen stays on while it's open on most phones. If nobody wants to do the voices there's a read it to me button too. Open this page once while you've got signal and campfire mode keeps working with none, which is handy because the good campsites never have any.
Every one of these was told by a real person and we can't vouch for what any of them saw. We left out the stories about creatures from living Indigenous and local traditions, like the wendigo and the skinwalker. Those still belong to the people who tell them and it didn't feel right to turn them into campfire entertainment.
Every story in the mix
Witness stories (95)
The long ones. Most take two to four minutes to read out loud.
- The pale thing at the edge of the yard
- The lights at every window
- The horse that became an owl
- A dark hand on the tree
- All three of us shouted the same word
- I said hello and it walked away
- I say good morning to it now
- It stood up out of the tall grass
- Knocks across the holler
- Long red-brown hair at eye level
- Oh, stop growling
- Something leaned on the van
- Something living in the old schoolhouse
- Something touched her through the tent
- Something touched his head through the tent
- Stones against the tent
- Summers at the back loop
- The chief forester's three secrets
- The chorus in Gifford Pinchot
- The cousin who kept a secret
- The deer snorted and ran
- The figure at the bench on the hilltop
- The figure on the cliff above our camp
- The figure on the ridge above Crater Lake
- The footprints that circled behind us
- The gift exchange
- The guide who heard footsteps behind him
- The night the guard dog froze
- The one that hid by the cabin
- The roar at the booster station
- The scream above Atlin
- The scream on Mount Ida
- The sound he heard twenty years later
- The tree in the boat
- The wrappers were sorted into piles
- Three times in the logging camps
- Two feet, walking up to the tent
- Under the train car
- Voices on the Trinity River
- Was that you?
- White fur behind the porch plants
- A triangle crossed the full moon
- Parked over the I-5
- Two kids at the end of the aisle
- A decade of dead cattle and no blood
- The bull nothing would eat
- It jumped onto the stop sign
- The scream in the cornfield
- Between the tobacco barns
- Claw marks on the garage door
- Five friends and the thing on the tracks
- It stepped over the fence like a garden gate
- It stood up at the river bridge
- It stood up in the neighbour's driveway
- It was crouched at the edge of the clearing
- Lightning, then red eyes by the satellite dish
- On the rock across the creek
- Opening night at the hunting camp
- She screamed at it and ran
- Something with silver eyes, twice
- The hum on the Fiery Gizzard trail
- The porch light kept coming on
- The surveyor's cut line
- Under the yellow streetlight
- The duende on the golf cart path
- The dwende under the house
- It looked exactly like a flying saucer
- Only the two of us looked up
- The little man in the top hat
- The skaters on the frozen pond
- My grandfather said it looked like a bear
- The man by the ice machine
- Two men in a black Cadillac
- Three tall white figures by the tracks
- A hundred orbs over Mossley Hill
- The light that scanned the mountain
- The orange light on garbage night
- Too long to be a seal
- Something touched my hair in the dark
- The glittering figure that pulled my leg
- There's a man watching us from that tree
- Ten people, a stuck truck and something that charged
- The man in the hat in the fields
- The man with no face on Mount Shasta
- The top-hat man and the girl named Sarah
- The wizard in the trenches
- Something lifted my dog off the ground
- Grandpa took the shot
- Something with wings behind the tree
- The bird that walked into the field
- The brown cat with blue eyes
- Footsteps past the window in the rain
- Something on the roof at Pillar Valley
- The tree trunk that moved
- Three knocks and a falling tree
Short ones from the creature pages (136)
A minute or less, for when the fire's dying and you need one more.
- Two little brown men among the baboons
- Przhevalsky hears of the 'man-beast'
- The Soviet 'snowman commission'
- Hair samples tested
- The shape-shifter of Darlington
- Magraner's fifty eyewitnesses
- Brigham Young sends a rope
- Bishop Budge sees a fox-faced swimmer
- A dark 40-foot serpent from a schooner
- The Dusseau brothers' beached monster
- A whole crew sees it wrestling in the water
- Forty-five minutes off Crystal Beach
- The word 'bunyip' first appears in print
- A 'bunyip or immense platypus' in the Yarra
- The Challicum bunyip outline
- Stocqueler sketches one on the Murray
- Four shotgun blasts on a Gundagai lagoon
- A skeleton in the ice at Glacier Island
- The camel-headed serpent gets a name
- Henry Island remains
- 'Sarah the sea hag' on Kitsilano Beach
- Two police officers and a line of sea lions
- The Kelly Nash video
- Captain Crum's 187-foot serpent
- P. T. Barnum offers a reward
- Sheriff Mooney's water serpent
- The Champlain quote that never was
- Clicks recorded under the lake
- The Bodette-Affolter video
- Eight sheep with three puncture wounds
- A hundred animals killed in Calama
- The Elmendorf Beast
- A roadside carcass in Maine
- A deputy's dashcam video
- Hobley collects more accounts
- Maclean's calls it a new species
- Lumberjacks see a man with a dog's head
- Attacked by a pack, one on two legs
- Standing behind the car in the driveway
- A cabin break-in at Luther
- John Baxter on Miller Hill Road
- Thirteen sightings in one summer
- Skid marks and a gummy deposit
- Memphis Enquirer's hairy wild man
- A boy fires bird shot at it
- Fined for a fake monster report
- Seen crossing Highway 71
- Forty sightings in a year
- A slander case over the talking mongoose
- The new owner says he shot Gef
- Agricola's mine spirits
- Cornell's serpent in the Orange River
- The Hobyahs move to the Australian bush
- A 'real hodag' at Lake Minnetonka
- Four-toed tracks and a dead boar
- Film found after Ford's death
- The grinning man of Elizabeth
- Ben Franklin's 'ghost' rival
- Mother Leeds's thirteenth child
- The Leeds devil 'turned up again'
- The engineer who quit his run
- A 'Jersey devil' found dead near Kinkora
- Hoof prints in pairs at Groveville and Trenton
- Red wings over Hightown, Virginia
- Sixteen officers search the farm
- A wounded man and the Prince of Wales
- Sanderson and Russell are dive-bombed
- A chest wound and a sketch
- A Telegraph photo turns out to be a stork
- An 'Irish lubrican' on the London stage
- Airman's shooting story falls apart
- A chewed-up van in Bishopville
- Drinking from Black Creek
- Nessie back after the war
- Three frog-faced figures by the road
- The officer who shot an iguana
- Pokemon Go players see it again
- A ten-foot octopus on the beach
- The 'giant scuttle' of Hole-in-the-Wall
- A rubber tapper's Sunday story
- Saint-Hilaire hears of a lake monster
- A dead one with armadillo skin
- Captain von Stein's report
- Doris Harrison sees it holding a dog
- The fire chief's headlights
- Locals pick out a sand boa
- Mackerle's 'thumper'
- A worm lizard, not a killer
- A TV reporter's interviews
- Teenage copycats caught
- Gawker turns it into a sensation
- Connie Carpenter's daylight sighting
- A photo on Route 2
- Fifty-five 'Mothman' reports in Chicago
- A phantom airship over Smethport
- Hugh Nevill records the last of the Nittaewo
- MacDougal's horses pulled under
- Girl Guides see a 45-foot creature in Otter Bay
- Fifty tourists on a Kelowna beach
- The Chaplin tape
- The water-skier video
- Sonar near Rattlesnake Island
- Peachland humps photographed
- Van Heerwarden's sedapa in a tree
- What the bomber crews called foo fighters
- Two campers meet an owl 'as big as a man'
- John Russell invents the Piasa legend
- A 'striped marsupial cat' in a natural history book
- Becalmed beside it off Stonington
- Fishermen fire on a Cumberland River monster
- A Quaker who ran along Lynn Beach after it
- Moonlight picnickers on the Des Moines River
- A car grabbed on a lonely road
- A face at the window
- The Broward County skunk ape flap
- A bill to protect 'humanoid animals'
- Fire chief photographs a figure crossing the road
- Roduner's mountain dragon
- The Tinner brothers' cat-headed serpent
- The TV movie that aired days before
- Tombstone's 'winged monster' on the Huachuca desert
- 'Body like a naval torpedo' over Alton
- Ahead of a storm over Highway 3
- First written mention of the Fair Family
- Von Haast's spotted pelt
- The York County varmint
- A 'willapus-wampus' near Emory University
- The wild man is captured
- A runaway notice for the 'Wild Woman'
- 'The Minister of Yeren' collects testimony
- Hairy men scale a city wall
- Town and Country Journal on the 'hairy man of the wood'
- McCooey's 'indigenous ape'
- A future senator's school-trip sighting
- Mango farmer metres from a hairy figure
- The Piper film
Got one of your own? Report an encounter and it might end up in here.