The only thing that really stands out is this weird Fortean thing that happened back in the early 1980s when I was a young 20 something. Me and my picking buddy Dan were chilling one evening in his driveway burning one, when another old high school bud Stanley stopped by in his old pickup with his two coon dogs in the back. He said let's go down to the creek bank and listen to the dogs run and have a beer. So we grabbed a six pack and went down a little field road into the swampy woods by the creek about a mile from any house, turned the dogs loose, sat on the tailgate, and cracked a beer. The dogs took off and we could hear them running thru the woods trying to pick up a scent like coon dogs do.
We sat there shooting the sht for perhaps 30 min when we heard this strange low frequency grunting/thumping sound way off in the distance, seemingly several hundred yards away. Closest I can describe it was like the sound of someone trying to pull start a lwawn mower or kick start a motorcycle. We commented that's odd not sure what that might be....
Not a min or two later we heard the same sound but LOUD and CLOSE, like right there in the bushes beside the truck! There was no sound of anything approaching, just a far off sound and then almost instantly the same sound coming outta the bushes right beside us! At the same time the 2 dogs suddenly appeared outta nowhere and jumped in the back of the truck! We didn't say a word to each other, we just instantly jumped in the truck and hauled ass outta there!
When we got back to the main road and caught our breath we laughed at ourselves for panicking, and went on back home.
Here's the even odder thing. Me and Dan didn't talk about the experience for a year or two. It's like we blocked it out of our memory. Then one day it just came to me and I asked Dan if he remembered it. He said, "yea I guess, kinda, but I thought I dreamed that". I was adamant that no, we both didn't dream it, it actually happened. So we went and looked up Stanley the coon dog guy and asked him about it. He was adamant that we were crazy and it never happened. He still denies remembering anything about it to this day.
WTH was it? I have no fking clue. Ive been in the woods all my life and never experienced another sound like that. Ive often thought about going back there and camping for a cheap thrill but the place is no long accessible by land due to development, and getting there by canoe would require extensive bush hacking thru tree falls. So it remains my one mysterious "horror in the woods".