this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
23 points (96.0% liked)

Hiking

1342 readers
1 users here now

founded 2 years ago
 

I was hiking in a wilderness area...a very remote trail without a lot of action, and at one point I heard voices...I swore I heard human voices.

It was up in the mountains, too, so there wasn't much to make noise like that.

Obviously, I know it's my brain hearing trees groaning in the wind and quickly shortcutting to, "must be a human voice!" But it was just eerie.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

Kinda, yeah.

Not so much while actively hiking, and not usually human voices, but sometimes the way wind moves through things, or those things move can be eerily like all kinds of sounds. When you're near running water too, it gets more likely.

Most of the things my brain would try to paste onto the real sounds were things like cars idling, or kitchen noises. There was one night I could have sworn someone was opening and closing a fridge door; you know that sticky sound as the door opens on older fridges.

Plenty of times, I would perceive sounds as laughter. There's a stretch of one creek I used to camp near that the water and echoes sound like a comedy club chuckling lightly.

Never voices, or even moans and groans. I think I was too familiar with what the sounds actually were for my brain to try latching onto things like that.

Oh! Horses! There's another place I would camp that I'd hear horses, whinnying, and hooves clopping. No way it actually was, the only trail in was too soft for hooves to make noise like that, and too narrow and overgrown for a horse to get through. Never did figure out what it really was.

In my more hippy-dippy days, meditating out in the woods, as my mind would get quiet, there was even a perception of the trees talking. It didn't sound human, with words, but there were pattern to the wind and branches moving that "felt" like communication.