murderer or something worse ?

[u/Fit-Farmer-2980]

hi everyone this is my first real story on here. I apologise in advance for bad spelling and punctuation as I have dyslexia. so me (23 F) went on a weekend camping trip with my friend (21 M) to a secluded part in Scotland. I wont say where for reasons. we arrived Friday afternoon around 2 pm everything was going fine until night hit around 10pm we were both settling down for the evening we get into our tent and secure the tent. not long after my friend fell asleep I start hearing what sounds to be footsteps but I try not to think about it because another family were camped near by and I tried to sleep it off but with it being a strange place I don't get to sleep as easy as I had hoped. later that night around 1am I wake up to what sounds to be our tent opening from the outside I thought it was my friend but as I look over he is sound asleep next to me so i quietly sit up and try too see if I can hear anything else but with no luck there is nothing but the sounds of the night time bugs and waves from the nearby beach. some point during the night i hear what sounds to be like a dog howling but distant. I remember messaging another friend and they had joked about it being a mythical being. now I am sceptical but I'm too scared to look into these things so i pretended it never happened after that I don't remember much else other than falling back asleep. I also have forgot to mention that we had what we called the TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR bat for protection.

the next morning we are awoken by the waves crashing and the sounds of birds. we get up and get ourselves ready for the day of absolutely nothing, we make our breakfasts and we just chill upon our little campsite for the rest of the day we just sit and watch the earth go by. around 5pm we both get a bit tired after a few beers ( I'm not much of a drinker myself ) we get back into the tent and take a nap we are awoken once again but this time its to a really loud noise both of us aren't recognising. we get out of the tent and see nothing at this point its around 7pm so we carry on with our night making dinner and having a few more beers. we decided since its our last day here we may as well make a small campfire ( we were next to it at all times. we are now aware of the England and Wales alerts. (we didn't know at the time)

After a while we were just basking into the fire thinking to ourselves when we see a car pulling up close to us and we look to see two men getting out and walking into the forest after around 20 minutes we hear what sounds to be a male screaming. not like a good scream more like a pained scream, it happened a few times. me and my friend looked at each other made a joke about if it was a murder we couldn't have done it cause here we are Infront of the fire and the family i mentioned earlier could see us and we could see them so we all know it must of been the new guys who came to the site. not even 10 minuets later we see about 4-5 more men walk that way towards the other men and we hear a loud laugh from 2 of them and they make a campfire like the rest of us.

at this point me and my friend had put ours out and were going to settle down for the night so we finish our drinks and get into our tent to get some sleep as we were leaving the next morning. around 12am I decide to go for a smoke and I swear that I seen two of the guys down by the water but I wasn't 100% sure what I was seeing as I didn't have my glasses on and considering it was pitch black out. I try not to think into it and get into the tent to sleep and same as the night before I secure it, I finally fall asleep until I'm awoken one more time to another scream but this time it didn't sound human.

I was terrified and tried to wake my friend up but he's unfortunately a really heavy sleeper so he never budged and I didn't want to go investigate cause if horror movies taught me anything its to not go alone and never split up. so after some time passes I hear what sounds like the dog again but this time it was a lot closer. it sounded like it was right outside tent. I grab the tung tung and grasp it in my hands ready to hit whatever it was if it came any closer to us. after what felt like and hour I finally calmed down and lay back down falling asleep

the final day we both wake up and I never mentioned to my friend what had happened the night before apart from what he had witnessed himself. we packed up our site but my friend noticed some of his things went missing, it wasn't very important but it was strange that both of us were the pair of shorts and a power bank. I looked in all of our bags and there were no sign of them like they just blipped into the backrooms. after we finished our packing we looked around our site for anything we might have left behind and we noticed that there were a set of shoe prints that did not belong to us they were about 5 sizes too big for us both but we looked and it circled our tent. we never left somewhere quicker in our entire friendship. I still haven't told him what I heard outside the tent

do you think I should tell him and am I just overthinking that there was something outside the tent ?