Chapter 30 : We Got Lost in a Forest and it was one of the Strangest Experiences of my life

The following is a story that took place quite a few years back now, however it still baffles me completely and I'd like to share it here.

I'm a teenager and I've been in Scouting / boy scouts for nearly all my life and I really enjoy exploring with my friends and being trusted more, as I'm older now. A few years ago me and 2 girls named Amy and Harriet were asked to head into the woods surrounding our campsite to find a long, straight stick suitable for carving into a point. Bear in mind that I was a lot younger back then. Harriet was older and Amy only one year older than myself. We had been walking in deliberately the same direction as to not get lost, and memorizing the surroundings as we went, in order to find our way back easily. About 15 minutes in we couldnt find anything to take back so we turned around to return to the campsite. Thats the initial panic set it. The trees had almost unnaturally knitted themselves together in such a way that it seemed our path was nonexistent in the first place. Like it had just vanished. We looked around 360 degrees and now everything looked exactly the same. Trees we couldve sworn were different from one another appeared as all copies of the same tree. We kept walking in what we thought to be the correct direction, whilst shouting out for help, and eventually came to a concrete path, almost like a road, but very thin, separating the forest, splitting it in to two. We didnt follow the road as it went in the wrong 'direction' to our campsite.

On the other side of the path was more forest, however nearby was an abandoned shack, likely used for storage or whatever else. We had no idea anything like this was out here in these woods, so we just kept walking. We eventually came to a road we didnt recognise. A woman wearing a pink and purple 'regatta outdoors' coat walked past and we frantically asked her for the direction of our campsite, as by now, according to our watches and Harriet's phone, we'd been walking for an hour and a half. She said shed never seen us before but she said theres another campsite in 'that direction'. We followed her advice and eventually came back to our campsite.

We frantically apologized for being so long and that we couldnt find anything. The leader 'Ian' could see all three of us were shaken up and he stated confused that 'wed only been gone 25 minutes, and that our free time was still going on'. To this day this baffles all three of us, as our free time was 40 minutes long, and our watches and phones had said wed been gone for hours. The forest we were lost in felt crushing and claustrophobic, like wed entered an area that the concept of time didnt apply to. I believe in the paranormal, however this was so unlike anything I've heard or experienced before. It literally was like wed been in a time vortex or something, and that hours in the forest were only minutes in the rest of the world. The feeling was very strange and it stuck with me for the rest of the camp.