These terrifying tales will make you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere—almost.
This year, we’ve given up a lot of outdoor activities. It’s not like we’re upset about it. More important than hiking excursions and summer marathons is saving lives. However, as the weather warms, I find myself yearning for the fragrance of a campfire in my hair. The sound of owls, the depleting quantity of beer in the cooler, and the way time stand still while you wait for the flames to die are all things I miss.
But it’s the stories that I miss the most. Something about the firelight in the wilderness darkness makes you lean in and listen a little more intently. A few drinks of alcohol, of course, never hurt a good tall tale.
We won’t be able to bring back your springtime campfires with buddies. We can, however, deliver you some of our greatest campfire tales. Save these three for when things get back to normal—or tell them to your buddies right now over a Zoom call.
1. Milford Road’s Ghost in Oxford
There was a notion when Brad Culp was a student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, that the town was one of America’s most haunted. Culp couldn’t wait to write about several of the area’s most famous phantoms when he founded an on-campus magazine. But not long after his story was published, he couldn’t stop thinking about one ghost in particular: the Oxford Milford Road phantom.
According to the account, a young guy courted a young woman in a rural area of town many decades ago, most likely in the 1940s. He visited under the cover of darkness every night because the woman’s parents didn’t approve of the match. The young woman would sneak out of her farmhouse after her parents had gone to bed and flash the lights of her parents’ car three times. Then her young admirer would speed down the road on his motorcycle.
“One night, he took a bit too abrupt a curve directly before her house,” Culp adds. He went one way and the motorcycle went the other. He died as a result of his injuries, which were too serious for him to survive. His lovestruck spirit, though, is said to still haunt this stretch of Milford Road.
Curios, Culp, his girlfriend (now his wife), and a buddy set out one night to see if they could corroborate the story. His partner was concerned that she would be terrified. Culp says, “She believes more in that things than I do.” But he was mostly worried that his suspicions would be confirmed—that none of this was true. As Culp drove past the abandoned property one night, an idea came to him, and he presented it to his fiancée (how could she say no?). Culp turned a short distance into the farmhouse driveway, despite her reluctance.
He put the engine out of commission and flashed his lights three times. “No kidding, three-quarters of a mile down the road, there was a single headlight,” Culp adds. “You noticed it start to approach, moving slowly. It kept coming, and coming, and coming, and coming, and coming, and coming, My wife was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was getting nearer and nearer.” Culp put on his car’s lights as a collision appeared near. He was expecting to see a child on a bike fleeing his joke now that he’d been discovered. “However, there isn’t anything there.” “The light has simply vanished,” he says.
They exited the vehicle. They took a walkabout, trying to figure out what they had seen. “We still talk about it to this day.” He says, “I saw something I can’t explain.” If you get him and his wife together around a campfire, they’ll swear the story is true. If you’re ever in Oxford, Ohio, try parking on Oxford Milford Road at night for a few minutes to see how brave you are.
2. Was it humans or extraterrestrials?
Doug Averill grew up on his parents’ huge dude ranch, the Flathead Lake Lodge, in rural Montana, as one of eight boys. The Averill boys were rowdy as teenagers. He recalls, “We rode around like a small gang of cowboys.” They’d saddle up and ride off to check cattle on the family’s three massive ranches, which formed a triangle around some of the state’s most desolate rangelands.
The boys came across a horrifying sight one summer in the 1960s. Three dead cows were neatly arranged in a circle on the ground. Although there were no noticeable wounds, their reproductive organs had been removed. “However, there was no blood.” “It was virtually a medical procedure,” Averill recalls. During this decade, America was preoccupied with aliens, and local newspapers published articles speculating that extraterrestrials were to blame. Aliens had abducted the reproductive organs for testing, some speculated. However, Averill and his companions came to find a lance along their route one day. A cryptic note with a frightening warning was attached to it. “That’s when we realized it’s had to be people,” he explains.
Then things started to become weird. A succession of strange happenings occurred over the next few days. The brothers first stopped at a nearby tavern for a meal before loading their horses into a stock truck. The horses were crammed in close together, and the Averills were only gone for a short time. When they returned, the horse in the middle of the vehicle had magically escaped without a struggle. He explains, “We had no notion how they could have unloaded that horse without emptying all the others.”
The next day, a new wrangler on the ranch was critically hurt after falling from his horse. They’d all been travelling together, but no one else in the crew had noticed the crash. “It was the strangest thing,” says Averill. The individual suffered such serious injuries that he was rendered permanently crippled. Finally, the final dreadful event occurred. An elderly camp chef drove out to meet the brothers and take a day ride with them. However, when he arrived, the tailgate on his stock vehicle had mysteriously vanished, even though it had been present when he’d loaded up. Betsy, his horse, had gotten loose from the truck and had been pulled behind it for who knows how long.
They had no choice but to put her down. “To be honest, seeing what had happened to Betsy just destroyed him.” “We probably should have put him down as well,” Averill recalls. “Those three incidents were simply boom, boom, boom—three things in a succession that were all so strangely connected because they happened shortly after we saw that spear,” he recalls. Three items, similar to the three dead cows arranged in a circle. Around the campfire, Averill used to tell a lot of stories about that summer. However, as he’s received fresh stories over the years, they’ve been shifted out of rotation. Besides, they’re rather bleak. However, he recently received a report regarding a downed bull, a buffalo.
It was in one of his ranch’s most secluded locations. “A neighbour had observed a pack of 16 wolves, and wolves don’t usually bother buffalo, but 16 of them? “Perhaps,” I reasoned.
He went to look into it. The bull was lying in a snow-covered pasture nearby. Its body, however, had no bullet holes, teeth marks, or gashes. Even odd, it had escaped the attention of scavenging animals and birds. “Not even the buzzards,” he says, which is rare. Something else was wrong: its reproductive organs were missing. There wasn’t a single footprint in the snow around it, or anywhere along the mile-long walk in from the nearest road.
If you ask Averill if he thinks he’s working with aliens or humans, he’ll tell you he’s very convinced he’s dealing with people. “However, I’d prefer it to be aliens,” he says. After seeing what humans were capable of during that summer in the 1960s, he’d take aliens over humans any day.
3. The Ghost of La Parva Ski Resort
Various versions of the narrative of La Llorona, or the weeping woman, may be found all over Latin America. She’s misplaced her husband on occasion. She’s misplaced her children on occasion. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. The crying woman, however, is named Lola in La Parva, a ski resort in the Chilean Andes, and everyone in the neighbourhood claims they knew her before she died. “A local restaurant owner claimed he dated her,” says pro skier Drew Tabke, who adds that the ski patroller who told him the story pointed to the precise cabin where the story takes place.
The narrative begins on a beautiful day during peak skiing season. Lola had intended to spend the day on the slopes with her young son. “A heavy fog crept up from the valley, as is common in the Andes, which often precedes the advent of a genuine storm.” “As they were making their way down from the top of the mountain, the clouds surrounded them, and they lost contact with one another,” Tabke says.
Lola began yelling her son’s name as she hurried through the dense fog, desperate to reach him. She stumbled down a steep hill and began falling into a rocky couloir, unable to see clearly.
“A local lift operator was returning to his cabin when he came across her body by chance. He thought she was dead, but upon closer study, he discovered she was still alive, if barely,” Tabke explains. Her body was covered in lacerations from sharp rocks, and the only thing she said was her son’s name, which she said in the slightest whisper.
The lift operator cautiously lowered her body to his cabin, which was only a short distance away. He raced to get the doctor after bandaging her cuts as best he could. The doctor and the lift operator walked back to his hut together, the fog heavy in the air. The bed, however, was vacant when they arrived. All that was left were the bloody sheets.
Tabke claims that neither the woman nor her son was ever discovered. Locals, on the other hand, claim to hear her wailing for her child every time they pass by the lift operator’s cabin.
Tabke, on the other hand, does not believe in ghosts. When he visits Chile each winter, however, something changes. Maybe it’s because you can look up to Cerro el Plomo, an Incan child-sacrifice site, from La Parva. Perhaps it’s because Tabke has read so many magical realism books by authors such as Juan Rulfo and Gabriel Garcá Márquez. But, alone in his Andes cabin, with the wind howling and the candles flickering, he swears he can’t tell if what he’s hearing is a woman or the wind now and again.
- Credits goes to all the storytellers from Outside
Priyangka is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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