Anyone who enjoys hiking has made an upsetting discovery at some point. From graffitied trees to carelessly discarded bottles and wrappers to lost hiking gear, people aren’t always as conscientious on the trails as they should be. Stumbling upon a group of trees adorned with animal skulls while hiking, however, is a whole different ballgame.
Cole and Dana Kempf have spent the last few years exploring the trails of British Columbia, Canada. Finding one they particularly enjoyed, the pair took to hiking it daily, enjoying the calming sights and sounds of the forest. Their beloved trail is located in Yellow Point Park, a popular nature reserve on the BC coast.
Day in and day out, they would walk the trail without incident. Then, on a fall day in 2021, their favorite hiking spot took on a far more sinister quality when the pair found a variety of animal skulls hanging from the trees along the trail.
“We nearly walked this trail every day together during [the pandemic], discussing our lives, etc,” Cole told Newsweek. “He and I found the skulls hanging up in the Yellow Point Park trail one day in October 2021.”
The pair did their best to laugh it off as an odd prank or grotesque work of art. In reality, however, neither could deny or shake the sinking feeling they experienced at the macabre sight.
“When we both noticed the skulls we both kinda laughed but we were secretly scanning the area for the rest of the day,” said Cole. “We assumed it’s some eccentric artist of some sort—but we had no intentions of touching them.”
Hikers Claim Skulls Made the Hiking Trail More Special
Despite being wary of the morbid new decor, Cole maintains that finding the deer skulls on his favorite hiking trail only made it more magical. The pair typically don’t see any other hikers on the trail, even though they walk it daily.
“We tend to get this certain stretch of the park to ourselves as it’s a fairly large slot of land, hence why we enjoyed it so much,” Cole said.
The hiker’s fellow internet users, however, tend to disagree with him. “You haven’t seen any horror movies have you,” one user wrote. “What in the Silent Hill,” another said.
Are trees decorated with skulls the weirdest sighting ever made on a hiking trail? Probably not. In a bizarre AskReddit thread, hikers shared the “strangest things” they’d ever seen on the trails, and some of their answers are downright terrifying.
One Florida hiker, for example, claimed to have seen a graduation portrait of a girl “stabbed into the ground with a kitchen knife and surrounded by black candles.”
Another hiker said they once stumbled upon an abandoned shack with a caged turtle inside reduced to nothing but a shell and skeleton. And those are just a couple of the safe-for-work sightings.
