Wednesday One-Shot: Creepy Hermits of the Woods

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Welcome to Wednesday Wand Shots, the bi-weekly series where we share a bonus story with you in the middle of the week.

This time we have a story by an author named Quiet Protocol.

When I was younger, around 13 or 14 years old, I was invited to go on a camping trip with my best friend Pat, his dad, and his uncle.

It was this kind of guys weekend, which was something that I'd like to do with my kids now.

We planned to fish, cook over fires, have our first couple of beers, sleep in tents, and do some other stuff like that.

We drove pretty far up north, but this many years later, being thirty, I can't remember where we went exactly.

I know it was about two hours north of where I currently live.

We had parked Pat's dad's truck off to the side of the road, in a bush, and canoed a pretty far distance down the river to a lake and set up our camp at the edge of the water.

Right across the water we could see this really old abandoned looking cabin.

Well, from the outside it looked abandoned.

The roof was sagging, and all of the bushes were overgrown to the point of growing over the cabin itself.

At one point, Pat's dad and his uncles were fishing and drinking, and they allowed us to go adventuring by ourselves for a bit.

Surprisingly, they actually allowed us to take one of the canoes across the water to check out the abandoned cabin.

In hindsight, I don't think that I would let my boys do something like that, since I wouldn't be able to get to them in an emergency.

But they were drunk and feeling loose.

Having this kind of freedom, granted to us fourteen-year-old boys, was exciting, so we did exactly that.

We paddled across the water and checked it out.

On the outside, this thing looked super dilapidated.

The front door was unlocked, so we let ourselves inside.

That was a mistake.

Once we were inside, it was evident that this place was most certainly not abandoned.

It was very much lived in.

It really freaked us out knowing somebody was living there, but whoever did seemed to be nowhere nearby.

There were porno magazines spread across the table, a bong, a trayful of weed, beer bottles everywhere, and on one of the shelves in the living room were two hunting shotguns.

I know it was dumb of us to play with them, but we did.

We never pulled the trigger on them, though.

We just walked around the house with them since it made us feel cool.

We checked out different rooms in the house, but one really creeped us out.

One of of the rooms had a bunch of mannequins, like you would see in a clothing store.

None of them were wearing any clothes, but they were all wearing wigs that were different lengths and colors.

Something felt really off about that, so we decided that we had had enough and left after putting the guns back where we found them.

After canoeing back to our campsite, we told Pat's dad everything,

and he was almost as stunned as we were.

That evening, we fished some more, and Pat caught a fish that his dad cooked over the fire.

While we were eating dinner, two guys came by in a motorboat and stopped at our sight.

They were friendly enough, we all joked around a bit, and we assumed that they were just some other campers or people who came out there to fish just like us.

But then they invited us to hang out at their cabin just across the water.

Pat's dad politely declined, but they continued to linger, and things started to feel weird.

The two guys had been drinking quite a lot, and they were exchanging weird looks.

At one point, they asked me and Pat if just the two of us wanted to go over and hang out.

Pat's dad gave them a stern no, which made things even more awkward.

They stayed a little while longer until it got dark, but then they left.

Later that night, Pat's dad and uncles stayed up all night by the fire while we were told to go to sleep in the tent.

Now Pat and I didn't do much sleeping.

We were mostly just talking about how creeped out we were by those two guys who lived in that cabin.

We kept talking about their porn, guns, and all of those mannequins with their wigs, and eventually we fell asleep.

When I woke up in the morning everything was packed up since Pat's dad was cutting the trip short.

All we had to do was take down the tent we were in, and we were out of there.

On our way back home, Pat's dad kept talking about how freaked out he was about those guys.

Pat and I have talked about it here and there over the years, but years ago we had a falling out.

I never got to ask exactly where that cabin was, so I have no idea, which is okay,

as I wouldn't want to go back there anyway.

To the bizarre wig-collecting hermits in the cabin, please let's not meet again.

If you're new here, be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform so you don't miss our full-length episodes released every Sunday morning.

This week you have heard, I Met Hermits on a Camping Trip When I Was 13 by Quiet Protocol.

It was produced and recorded with the permission of the respective author.

Let's Not Meet a True Horror podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online.

If you have a story to share, send it to Let's Not MeetStories at gmail.com.

We'll see you next week.

Stay safe.

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Kevin and Rachel and Peanut M ⁇ Ms and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his pecs glistened in the moonlight.

And Kevin, feeling weird because of all the talk about pecs.

And Rachel handing him Peanut M ⁇ Ms to keep him quiet.

Uh, Kevin, I can't hear.

Yellow, we're keeping it PG-13.

MMs, it's more fun together.