October is the season of fall colors, apple cider, and spooky campfire stories. As the cooler weather settles on the northern Minnesota landscape, evenings are best spent gathering around a campfire under a blanket of stars with friends and a good spooky story. Whether sitting around the fire in the backyard or while camping deep in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, there’s no denying the power of a good scary campfire story to make the evening just a little bit spookier. Here are some stories that may leave you with chills down your spine.
Eerie Full Moon Cross-Country Skiing Outing
If you have spent a decent amount of time in the woods, chances are you’ve had an experience where you feel like something or someone is watching you. Immediately, you can feel your body tense, and the hair on your arms or the back of your neck stand up straight.
For Debi LaMusga, a Grand Marais resident, that is precisely what occurred during a solo full-moon cross-country skiing outing at George Washington Pines up the Gunflint Trail nearly 20 years ago.
As LaMusga skied the nearly 2-mile trail at George Washington Pines underneath the full moon, she suddenly stopped in her tracks and sensed something wasn’t quite right. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she felt like something in the woods was watching her.
With wolves, cougars, and other wildlife common to the northern Minnesota landscape, she sensed something was hiding in the shadows of the full moon, keeping a close eye on her.
She said it wasn’t a sound or flash of movement that made her stop in her tracks but simply a feeling—a heightened sense of awareness that left her feeling uneasy.
“It was really significant to me,” LaMusga said. “That was pretty eerie.”
LaMusga said she put her head down, picked up her pace, and skied back to the trailhead with no other option but to continue on the trail. She said she never once looked behind her.
“I just kept skiing,” she said. “I made really good time.”
She safely returned to her car at the trailhead and quickly left.
Days later, LaMusga’s suspicion was confirmed when she saw a cougar run across the road near George Washington Pines while on her way to work.
Seagull Palisades Unexplained Mystery
Nearly two decades later, Erin Altemus is still stumped about what occurred one night at Seagull Palisades in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).
As a Camp Menogyn guide in the early 2000s, Altemus led a women’s combo rock climbing and paddling trip to the BWCAW, with a planned stop at the Seagull Palisades. After paddling the Boundary Waters for a few days, the group then spent time camping near the Palisades to enjoy and partake in rock climbing.
Altemus and her co-guide would set the temporarily fixed anchors and top rope each day and teach the novice climbers how to rock climb. After one particularly successful day of climbing, Altemus and her co-guide began retrieving all of the fixed anchors they had shoved into the cracks. However, one of the anchors proved incredibly challenging to remove.
“Nothing we did could get this nut out of that crack,” Altemus said. “It was so solidly in there.”
After attempting all of the known tricks in their toolbox to remove the equipment, Altemus said they decided to give up and stop back the following day to retry. “So we thought, we’re coming back tomorrow. We’ll just leave it for the night,” she said. “And we took everything else with us.”
That night, the group camped nearby on an island with a clear sightline of the Palisades and planned to return for another full day of rock climbing the next morning. Overnight, Altemus said, a massive storm rolled through with lightning and thunder. “There was thunder all night long.”
Much to their surprise, when the group returned to the Palisades in the morning, the metal anchor was not wedged in the same crack as it had been the day before.
Instead, it was lying on a rock six feet away.
Altemus said the group stood there dumbfounded, unsure about what they had witnessed. “We didn’t see anyone go to the Palisades,” she said. “No one could have been up there that night.”
The only feasible explanation the group could conger up was that lightning struck the metal anchor at night and dislodged it from the crack. But Altemus said she thought the probability of that seemed slim.
“Either lightning had come down and sent it flying, or something else happened,” she said. “I don’t know.” If no one else had visited the site and dislodged the anchor, Altemus said she didn’t see how else it could have become unstuck.
To this day, the mystery of how the metal anchor was dislodged from the crack and ended up six feet away remains. For the past 20 years, Altemus has continued to wonder about the mysterious events at Seagull Palisades that night. She shares the spooky story whenever she spends time with friends or new acquaintances, hoping to someday understand what happened.
Coming Face to Face with Eight Eyes in the Darkness
I have spent a fair amount of time in the outdoors throughout my life and have been lucky to have minimal close calls or scary situations. Of the ones I have encountered, they resulted from a poor decision paired with overconfidence.
Mother Nature quickly stepped in to remind me who the boss was. And I listened.
However, my most recent scary outdoor experience during the 2023 deer hunting season was slightly different.
On the fifth morning of deer season, I walked up on a pack of wolves – in the dark.
I started that morning, as usual, walking into my deer stand about 30 to 45 minutes before sunrise or legal shooting time. I sometimes feel a little uncomfortable walking in the dark woods alone, so I keep my head down and happy thoughts on repeat.
About ¾ quarters of the way to my stand, I lifted my head to find my next reflective trail marker. After seeing I was headed in the right direction, I began to put my head down and suddenly caught the reflection of something else about 200 feet in front of me and at a lower height than my trail markers.
I stood there with my headlamp pointed at my feet as my brain quickly processed what I had witnessed. I knew what it was and instantly knew I was in trouble.
My heart started racing, and the only thought in my head was, “Kalli, you need to lift your head.”
As I did, I caught the reflection of eight eyes staring back at me.
It was pitch dark, and I had just walked up on a pack of wolves. I had no idea whether they had just killed a deer and were eating or actively hunting. And if it was the latter, I had just walked up to them as a free and easy meal.
I began yelling at them at the top of my lungs. They didn’t budge. They stood their ground, and the lead wolf took one step toward me.
I took a step back and cocked my .32 Winchester Special. I fired a warning shot above their heads, but they still didn’t move. I fired a second warning shot. Still nothing. I then knew I was in trouble and needed help. They weren’t afraid of me, and I was unsure of their intentions, given their behavior.
I grabbed my cell phone and called my dad, who lives nearby. I managed to describe my situation and that I needed him to come get me. All the while screaming at the wolves and trying to bushwack the remaining distance to the safety of my deer stand.
As I moved north toward the direction of my deer stand, the wolves followed, keeping about 200 feet distance between us. I put my back against a tree, reloaded my gun, and waited for backup. The wolves eventually turned and continued on their way.
It took a couple of months following the encounter to adjust to being comfortable while alone in the woods again – even in the daylight.