Sespe Wilderness
I’ve told this story before but it bears repeating. I live in Central California, in the valley, bordered on all sides by hills and mountain ranges.
There are some great hikes and campgrounds all around, and my ex and I chose to go hiking in the Sespe Wilderness. It’s about a 2 hour drive from home, and it’s basically hiking in the mountains south west of Bakersfield off the highway that leads to Ojai and the coast. Gorgeous country, very remote, no cell service.
Both archeology hobbyists, we decide to hike out past Piedras Blancas, a giant rock formation, and keep on that same trail paralleling the Sespe Creek in order to look for some chumash pictographs. It’s about a 5 mile hike, hilly terrain, full of scrub brush and smaller trees. The trail is well maintained and we are mostly alone out there.
We reach an old campground about 3-4 miles out and I’m feeling tired, so I stop to rest at the campground. The campground is pretty much circular, there are several different campsites all in Plain view of one another, and just to the east there’s a large rock formation that overlooks the creek. The rock formation is kind of flat so I go over and lay down on the warm rocks so I can listen to the water.
He decides to continue further along the trail to see if he can locate the pictographs.
I don’t know how much time had passed when I hear the strangest howling scream I’ve ever heard. It went on for longer than a human should’ve been able to scream, and it alternated in from being very low and guttural to high-pitched like a woman.
So I shoot up off the rock and start looking around, and I don’t see anything. The sound didn’t repeat and I started to think that maybe I was just hearing an animal. All of a sudden he comes crashing back down the trail at full speed, thinking that he is hearing me screaming. He describes hearing it a little differently, that sounds I heard were not the sound he heard, but we both agree we heard something very strange and can’t explain it.
We both kind of look around the camp, don’t see anything out of the ordinary, and decide together that it’s time to head back.
So the sun is starting to set, it’s late afternoon and although it’s still light out, it’s that late afternoon golden hour kind of light.
We are walking back and still on the trail that parallels the creek and we start to hear boulders being thrown in the water.
If you’ve ever been a kid by a body of water, you know what it feels like to pick up the heaviest rock you can and toss it into the water to hear that KerPlonk sound that heavy rocks make. This was heavier than that, and we knew it.
We heard it several times, following us along the trail, and crashing sounds in the brush from across the creek.
Whatever was throwing the rocks was following us, making sure we knew we weren’t welcome. I have no idea what type of animal could throw very large boulders in the water like that.
If it was a human, they did a damn fine job of pranking us, because we were terrified.
We hurried as fast as we could, I ended up slipping on the trail and got a splinter in my arm that I wasn’t able to dig out for months.
We made it back to the parking lot near dark.
I’ve only found one other online post about strange things happening in the Sespe Creek wilderness.
I still don’t know what we heard.