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Witness: Jody
Location: White Mountains, New Hampshire
Date of Encounter: July 1972

I haven't really discussed this much with anyone, but after reading the encounters on this site, I was motivated to enter my encounter as a 14-year-old boy at the YMCA summer camp, "Camp Morgan" in the foothills of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

I was in the Lumberjack village — a village with wooden bases, three-foot walls, and canvas tents over these bases. I had been at camp for several weeks and the night of the encounter was a typical night in the mountains — cool, clear, and quiet. I had another buddy in the tent with me (Bruce). Our village was in the woods about a fourth of a mile from base camp where we ate and did activities.

I awoke at 2:00 AM and heard something outside my tent making heavy footsteps in the leaves and forest. I heard brush being swept aside and a strange sound that I cannot really remember, except it was not a bear, raccoon, coyote, wolf, or anything else that I'd ever heard before. I took my flashlight and woke Bruce — he got very scared too. We opened the rain fly of the tent and got a bearing of the direction of the sound. We then flipped on our high powered flashlights and beamed them all over the area but there was nothing that could be visually detected. Suddenly, leaves and branches started being pulled off trees and were thrown all around — almost like the wind was blowing them and something was tearing them off the trees — but nothing could be seen. We got very scared and screamed for our counselors who were in a tent about 60 feet from ours. At first the two counselors, Jimmy and Jay, started yelling at us — then threatened us that if this was a joke we were in deep trouble. But when Jim beamed his lights toward us and saw what we did, he yelled to get back in our tents and stay quiet. Jim grabbed a shotgun from his tent and Jay held a light — there were no tents in the area where the ruckus was taking place. He fired a 20-gauge shotgun from 20 feet away at the area where trees were being torn apart. Tree bark and branches blew apart but nothing was there! He fired again and again tree bark and leaves blasted into the air but nothing. Suddenly, small- to medium-rocks went flying toward our tent and one hit me right in the head. It hurt badly, but I was not cut. Rocks went flying in our direction several times and hit different tents. By now all of the kids were awake and were screaming in their tents. We heard something moving back into the deep woods. They were strange sounds — hard to describe, but sounded like a wailing of some sort — then it was dead quiet again.

No one could sleep that night. By now it was 3:00 AM and we made a large camp fire. Jim called the state police and camp head, they were all up here by 3:45 AM and took guns into the woods. All that was found was tree remains, lots of branches, and ripped apart saplings. We stayed awake and did not sleep the rest of the day. The next several nights the camp director camped out right in the middle of our village with several counselors armed with shotguns but this incident never occurred again. This is all the honest truth, and I never experienced anything as frightening in all my life again. 

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