Screaming Heard Four Nights Running Trails Hikers Through Northern Cascades

NORTHERN CASCADES, WASH. — A woman who says she walked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada in 2018 has asked the readers of r/Paranormal to explain a sound that, by her account, shadowed her party for four consecutive nights in Washington State.

The author, a Reddit user posting to r/Paranormal, writes that she had grown accustomed to the noises of the woods over 2,650 miles, among them falling pinecones, bears in the brush and marmots chewing gear. Danger, she says, had generally come from people in trail towns rather than from the wilderness. By Washington she was travelling with four other hikers, covering about 35 miles a day.

On the first night, according to the post, the group was at dinner when a shrill scream sounded from the forest roughly 300 feet off the trail. The author describes it as haunting and human-like, though it seemed to shift between a woman's voice and something animal. The party debated investigating in case someone was in trouble, but chose against it. The woods then fell unusually quiet, and she slept badly.

The sound returned the next evening, the author writes, apparently louder or closer, despite the party having covered many miles and thousands of feet of elevation. Bobcat, coyote and mountain lion were floated as explanations. Months later, back in New York, she says she listened to recordings of Washington's animals and found no match. The screaming continued for two further nights, she says, before the group reached a resupply town; nothing further occurred on the trip.

She closes by asking whether anyone familiar with the Pacific Northwest has theories, naming animals or the supernatural as possibilities, and apologises for the length of her account. She also admits to lingering guilt over not having searched for a possible person in distress.