I encountered another ghostly campsite while hiking with some friends on the Black Foot reservation by Minnie White Horse Lake, aka Cooper Lake. We had gone to the lake to fish but several of us were not big on fishing so we decided to go hiking instead.
Me, my ex husband Shawn, my brother Mikee, and his girl Sarah went hiking while the rest stayed to fish.
We had been hiking around for about an hour when we began to smell smoke. We followed our noses until we found the source.
At first I thought it was just a small group of braves on some kind of special camp out because they were all Indians dressed in traditional costume. The group consisted of 4 men about 40-45 years old and one man who looked to be in his 50s or 60s.
Since I thought they were there for a special reason I began to turn away. That's when I noticed that even though a fire burned brightly in the fire pit no one was adding fuel to it and it never consumed any of the fuel already there.
I decided to see what would happen if I spoke to one of them. I stepped forward and said "Oki" (hi) none of them even glanced at me. I tried once more "Oki, I come in peace." again no response. I looked at the rest of the group and they all looked as puzzled as I was. Shawn thought maybe they wouldn't talk to a woman for some reason so he tried "Oki" nothing happened, each of us tried in turn to get a response but we did not exist in their world.
After us trying over and over to make contact the camp faded away. As soon as the camp was gone I stepped into the middle and began digging around with a stick, after a bit of digging I found a couple of rocks that were burned on one side as if they had been in a fire ring.
We returned to the rest of the group and told them what had happened. My friend Katrina thought we were making it up but finally agreed we had seen "something" since we all told the same story.
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After being run off their ancestral lands in other areas the Tribes had to live in the area defined by the reservation borders, all their everyday activities played out in the forests around the Lake so I would think its no more surprising to find a random residual of an everyday activity such as a hunting camp than it would be to find the residual activity of a woman cooking dinner in an old house.