When I was a small girl, we went on a camping trip with about 10 to 15 other families, up into one of the wild mountain ranges of this great country. I was young enough that I cannot place the where, but I remember it being remote, as we had pack mules and horses to ride into our camp. Said camp rested within an upper meadow between two mountain peaks. If my memory serves well enough, it took an entire day of horse back riding to arrive at our destination.

My family and all the others were avid hunters, fishers, and the like so it was a lively bunch of folks. There were a mix of extended family, church friends, and close neighbors within our small city of campers, and man were they organized… it looked like a military fort when they were set up! Large campfires within and around the sleep areas, cooking pits, and tents set up in fashions meant to house children in the center, and adults camped on the outer ring that encircled the little ones during the night.

The reason that I remember this particular trip more so than others is a funny, and somewhat insidious reason… This is where I learned that parents develop that funny gramma and papa sense of humor, by practicing on their children when they are too young to know any better.

This particular camping trip was at the height of the hunting season, and the Elk were absolutely huge that year; the tags given out had been generous, as the numbers were too high at that time. I want to say that the norm were 5 point bucks. Please don’t judge my ignorant wordage, as I was young, and I have not been hunting since then, so my memory is jaded. Big Big Antlers!

Anyway, it was night time around the fires, and the parents decided it would be a great idea to tell scary stories to the kids… right before bed… in the dark… in the mountains…

I think it started as a way to keep kids scared enough to not wander outside of their tents in the dark without a parent, maybe, but that was when the insidious part began… Cretans…

The story was about a Ghost Elk that haunted the ranges where we were camping… sorry, I can’t remember the story, the horror was too real… lol. Basically, they put us to bed, waited for us to fall nearly to sleep and then play acted like a huge elk with a big rack, hollering and scratching its antlers against our tents…

Which by the way… we were able to only see the antlers through the reflections caused by all those ridiculously big fires placed all around the camp… realization right now, tells me they built those fires for effect, the big Turd Blossoms…

They got their come uppins though, since nobody ended up getting much sleep that night. All the parents ended up having to sleep in our tents to stop all the cryin and bellyaching…

***Lesson to learn here for parents is, with great power comes great responsibility… if you want to torment your children, You should always bring babysitters sillies***