Unsettling camping trip

Seeking Advice
1

This past weekend, I went to a well-known lake camping location in the Appalachian Mountains with my fiancée and a friend.

Since many of the places were already taken, we managed to find one in the back. When it was almost dark, we arrived, put up our tents, built a little fire to cook hot dogs, and then, at around 10:30 p.m., when the fire went out, we went to bed.

My girlfriend and I were alone in one tent, while our friend occupied the other tent.

I was the first to go to sleep, and about 12:30 I heard a very loud howl or scream coming from a distance. It was not an owl, bobcat, coyote, or dog. It sounded different, though.At last, I went back to sleep.Then I woke up to what I swear was our friend going outside and away from her tent to use the restroom. I heard what sounded like footsteps on some of the rocks, and I assumed maybe it was a tent zipper or something.Go back to sleep.
Then, when I woke up again, I estimated the time of day to be around 6:30AM because it appeared that there was some light outside. It seemed as though the sun was just beginning to rise.And finally here’s the best part. Around 4:25AM. I wake up freaking out. Screaming as if I’m being murdered. I have never felt like that before or had this happen before. My feet were touching the end of the tent, and I swear I felt something touching my feet from the outside of the tent, but I also felt like something was on top of the tent pushing it inwards on me. I screamed and swung for like 5 seconds extremely loud.
My girlfriend was then freaked out. I then had to calm her down. She explained she was freaked out by the howling earlier in the night, and she was having strange nightmares and could not sleep. Everytime she fell back sleep it was the same nightmare.
We both agreed that now we had to check on her friend because she probably thinks we just got murdered.
We sat quietly seeing if we could hear something or someone walking or breathing near the tent before I exited the tent. It was pitch black outside.I turned on the flashlight and got out. We went to see how her pal was doing. We packed everything up at 4:40 AM and left before 5 AM.
Because she claimed to be afraid, our acquaintance never ventured outside of her tent to urinate. What did I hear next? Was I attacked by something?
At one point, my partner also woke up and noticed that it was growing lighter. What on earth is happening?
Extremely eerie, 10/10; I’ll definitely go camping again.

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All sorts of stuff makes noise when there are no other sounds to drown them out. I’ve heard trees fall, coyotes howling, bears padding around outside my tent. That’s camping!

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This is why, until there’s a little light outside, I prefer to wear earplugs.

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I read this as “bears PADDLING around outside” and now I cannot get it out of my head how cool it’d be to watch a bear kayak by… my brain is tired.

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The zipper could have been your friend against his/her sleeping bag. Sound really travels.

False Dawn is a thing. It looks like Dawn is breaking but it is really still nighttime.

In your shoes I would have also packed up and gone. Intuition is often based on things that we might not have consciously taken in but our body has sensed it. It is not advisable to go against intuition.

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Are you familiar with sleep paralysis? This sounds a little bit like it. Not all, but a few. It may occur when you sleep in unfamiliar areas or experience extreme stress in your daily life. I’ve experienced it twice, and neither time did it match the mold of typical sleep paralysis; instead, I was seeing and envisioning frightening things outside my bedroom door. Like feeling confident that someone or something is going to touch me and kill me, or seeing shadows on the wall and hearing noises. yet never catching a glimpse of the assailant. That’s not to say there has to be a demon hunched over your chest. In particular, the sounds of the tent, the crunching, and the foot stuff might be your imagination playing tricks on you. I think you heard anything about