Summer Camp Part III
Zebras, Bears and Skin-walkers
Hello and welcome to Loved Like Lazarus! Today will be my final story of the theme, ‘this one time at summer camp’. This story is a bit creepy so be warned and don’t read on if you are afraid of spooky campfire stories.
In Southwest Colorado, especially in the Navajo Nation, skin-walkers hold the top spot in the, boogy man, bigfoot, chupacabra, slender man and other ‘supernatural’ beings/creatures. Here is what wikipedea has to say about them. Like it says on the page, I so not follow Navajo spiritual beliefs as a white male catholic, so I don’t know everything about them. Forgive me if I say anything wrong or offend in anyway, its not my intention. I am just trying to tell a story from my understanding from second and third hand accounts.
The first time I heard about skin-walkers I was in van journeying to San Diego on a service trip. I went to Fort Lewis College so our route took us through the Navajo Nation. I don’t remember how it came up in conversation, but someone told the whole van about a talk they had with an old Navajo man at a dinner potluck. Some background that the man relayed was that his dad always picked up hitch hikers. It was his belief that it could be the spirit of someone who needed to get somewhere. Again, idk if this is the belief that all Navajos’ have but this is what I heard. They see a hitch hiker but the dad decides this time not to pick him up because they were late to something and couldn’t be bothered. A little after passing the man, there is banging on the back passenger side fender area. The one telling the story then says he looked in the rear-view mirror and sees a creature running beside the car. It has a coyote or wolf head, the body of a man and runs in a haunting unnatural stride. His dad then speeds up and eventually they outrun the ‘wolf-man’ thing. When they get out of the car at their destination, they look at where the ‘wolf-man’ was running and banging and there are DENTS and SCRATCH MARKS!!!
I of course found this creepy and fascinating. As a catholic I believe in the occult, witches, and other supernatural beings. I’ve heard other stories witches turning into animals. Like, a man in India who could change into a tiger and went around eating children. Eventually, the village men camp out the beast and shoot it. They then follow the blood trail and it ends up in a known shaman’s house! However, the man was not a tiger anymore, but what in his own human body again!
I decided to save the story as a campfire story for the next summer to tell my campers. I told it on a few trips out in the backcountry and it creeped them out every time. I really didn’t think much of it or that I would ever encounter one until I did a 4-day trip from Silver Mesa, over Columbine Pass and down the Los Piños trail in the Weminuche Wilderness Area. It was my third and final year working at the camp so I believe it was my 4th time doing the Los Piños River stretch. We woke up on the third day and started our long trek to the next campsite. I was looking forward to it because I really liked the campsite we would be to next. There is a bend in the river and it looks out over a ‘cabbage field’. The site is right up against the pine trees. It also has a skull of a bull nailed to a tree way up it’s trunk, like 15 feet. I thought that was always pretty awesome.
We got up early and started our hike. I was at the front of the line and when I turned a corner, I see a man at the next bend standing in the trail picking and eating raspberries. He was wearing a woven sombrero type hat but otherwise looked pretty normal, like any other backpacker you would see. He is about 100ft away. He senses our presence and started sprinting down the bend. I barely saw the side of his face. I thought it was a weird encounter. Most people we come across just stand to the side and let our big group pass. I thought, “that dude is gonna break his neck if he keeps running that fast on the trail.” I knew that section of the trail and it was going to continue in a straight line for a while. I got to where he had been, fully expecting to see him jogging down the trail in the distance. But he wasn’t there. I thought he had darted off the to his camp or something. But the crazy thing about it was his footprints kept going…
It had rained the night before so the trail was clear, no footprints and a little muddy. The only footprints you could only see were his. Chacos sandals, the Colorado special. But the footprints kept going and going. I swear, even if he was Usain Bolt there was NO WAY he could have been running that fast without me rounding the bend and not seeing him, especially since the trail was so slick. We kept hiking and then all of a sudden, the Chaco prints stop and canine paw prints begin! I am talking immediately. I stop and look into the trees in both directions. I don’t see him or any trace of a tent or campsite. The canine paw prints go for an even greater distance and then stop suddenly. You could say, “well, the man stepped off the trail, the dog got on the trail and ran for a long time, then it stepped off the trail too.” I just find that hard to believe. The paw prints were alone. No human prints ahead or behind like it being with it’s owner hiking. Plus, idk if you have ever hiked with a dog, but they never stay on the trail for very long. They dart this way and that, chasing smells and living their best dog life. So, the dog would have had to run a long way, like a few football fields, never leave the trail, duck out and then backtrack and meander back to it’s owner far enough away from the trail that I didn’t see it. It is possible but improbable.
I stop the group a get really freaked out. Asking things like, “did you see that guy eating raspberries, did you see the paw prints, did you see a dog while we were hiking?” No one had seeing anything but the paw prints. A few of the campers had heard me tell the skin-walker story before, so they just thought I was messing with them, getting them all nervous for the that night and then scaring them. I was definitely in a ‘boy-cried-wolf’ situation.
Even if the campers weren’t scared, I was that night. I knew skin-walkers usually came out at night in their transformed bodies.
Here is my probability check list. Skin-walkers are:
Hermits that live in the wild away from everyone.
Usually transform into animals that are very fast.
Are tricksters.
There is a giant bull skull nailed to a tree right above our campsite.
I’ve heard that they are usually seen in your peripheral vision, but then when you look directly at them, they disappear.
Needless to say, it was a pretty restless night sleep for me. I didn’t see anything else the last day of the trip though.
Anyway, these make good campfire stories and I will continue to tell them. I hope I never come across a skin-walker again!
Lazarus walking out of the tomb must have been an unbelievable and eerie sight to behold. I am sure many people ran for the hills and thought he was a supernatural being or a ghost. Those who stood their ground in the crowd and believed Jesus raised him form the dead must have had incredible faith. I wonder if I would have stayed or ran LOL.
Until next time! God Bless!
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Feel free to comment or answer these questions:
Have you ever had a scary supernatural encounter?
Have you heard about skin-walkers? Is there anything I got wrong or missed?
Do you believe it was just a man and his dog or a skin-walker?