Why I will NEVER VISIT Crater Lake Oregon

Hi there. Crafter lake employee here. I’ve been to Crater Lake on a multitude of times for 20 years and a lot of the stuff is true and a lot of it is just myth. For example: 1. The old man of the lake is actually a giant ant colony in a tree log. That is why it floats vertically and floats in an odd way around the lake. If you look close enough at the log you can see a lot of them, coming out of the log. The ants will eat whatever insects float their way and they will bring it into the colony and feed the rest. That is why all the weight is at the bottom of the log because that is where the main ant colony lives. 2. The story of the old man falling off the ledge is true but the circumstances are shrouded in mystery. More than likely the guy was depressed and didn’t like his married life and committed suicide. However, there are more than five incidents of helicopters crashing into the crater in attempt to rescue people who have fallen into them and were heavily injured. 3. There was a submersible that went to the very bottom of the lake and they only discovered not even 1% of the bottom of the lake. I believe that is the most mysterious part of the lake out of all the stories. Because who knows what is at the bottom and what kind of relics or a new species live there. 4. The mystery of the man disintegrating, is a very mysterious thing indeed. A lot of my employees and myself agreed that it was just animals eating his corpse and his feet just remain because the animals didn’t want to eat it. Typically animals won’t eat the feet of prey or whatever they scavenge. The only thing that really does that are maggots. Which as you would imagine during the highest snow season of the year, there are no flies to be found whatsoever. So that explains the strange decomposition. 5. I have hiked on Garfield Peak and around the outer edge of the crater and I’ve never heard any voices whatsoever in the 20 years I’ve been up there. A lot of that is just myth and nothing to be scared of. I highly recommend anyone to go there and check out its beautiful splendor because you’ll never find anything like it. Also the lodge has fucking awesome pancakes! Go check it out.

I've visited Crater Lake many times, and the only "scary" thing I ever saw there was a bunch of drunken idiots in the campground using pressure-treated lumber as firewood.

I lived near Crater Lake for most of my life, and never experienced anything weird. I think if you go to a place with the expectation that it will be creepy, you'll notice more creepy stuff and there ends up being a confirmation bias.

My dad took our family to Crater Lake when I was 9, 70 years ago. I loved Wizard Island. It was beautiful. We stayed in Klamath Falls before returning to the southern part of the California Central Valley. On the way home we stopped and went swimming in the Kings River. My remembrances are so fresh as if it happened yesterday.

The strangest thing that happened to me at Crater Lake was when I went in to the gift shop near the hotel parking lot at the crater rim, I left $180 there and got a few shot glasses, some calendars, and some photo postcards. Some mysterious force sucked the life out of my Visa card. Some of the other guys in our motorcycle club felt this force as well. But the Prospect Historic Hotel was worth staying in.

There is a name of these type of vertical floating logs, "deadheads" Basically when the tree trunk fell in the lake and the bottom end with all the roots was holding enough rocks and dirt to keep that end weighed down and submerged. In the time it took the roots to rot enough to release the rocks it was holding, the top end dried out from the sun, and the bottom end became saturated with water, maintaining its position in the water.

I've lived in Oregon my entire life and I've been to Crater Lake. Not once have I heard of these "mysteries". Crater Lake is not scary, but it is pretty cool to see.

Our family has a cousin that visited Crater Lake several years back now. He was camping alone there somewhere, and was doing a lot of hiking around the lake. A visitor last saw him standing at the end of a cliff overlooking the lake taking pictures, and that was the last time he had ever been seen. Suicide was ruled out by friends and family members that knew him closely. Officials searched for his body below in the rocks for many days but never could find it. A very mysterious disappearance of his body to say the least.

Crater lake is one of the most beautiful enchanting places I have ever seen. It diffently pulls you in. Everyone should visit this awesome place.

Iv been there a bunch my whole life. Nothing strange has ever happened there

I went there as a kid with my family in the early 80s. I don't recall the old man phenomenon. The only scary part was when my uncle parked the van up close to the guard rail, and if you're not used to vans it feels like you're driving into the crater. My grandma almost had a heart attack.

I went there with my husband, off-season in 1970. Very few people around. I had no expectations nor had I heard anything frightening about the area, we were just traveling through the state and stopped there on a quiet Thursday afternoon. I don't know how it looks now, but in 1970 you could walk right up to the rim in this one particular area; we were alone, except for the sound of people speaking German and laughing…it sounded faraway through the trees. We never saw anyone, we could just hear them. My husband leaned up against a small tree in the shade, and I approached the rim. Mind you I have a terrible fear of heights, and especially of standing on the edge of tall things… I looked out over the expense of the lake, and I found it to be a very deep dark blue, I could see the forest beyond in an unbroken panorama of trees. Now here's where it gets strange. All of a sudden I had the most peculiar urge to just step back about 10 feet and take a running jump off the rim, tumbling sliding and bouncing from boulder to boulder on my way down to the water's edge. Of course it would've been fatal, but just for a second there it seemed like the right thing to do. It's very hard to explain; I didn't think consciously of such a thing, and it only lasted 2 or 3 seconds, but it almost seemed attractive, as if it was desired of me and it would be the correct thing to do… even that doesn't explain it. I'm not sure there's any words. In any event, before I was going to back up to jump off I looked again at the water; it seemed ancient, in kind of I guess, you’d call it a reptilian way. Something ancient, eternal, and then in my minds eye it seemed as if this ancient being was curled deep in the waters of the lake, ever waiting, ever patient. ( Yes, I know how that sounds ) I don't know if anybody's ever looked into the eyes of a shark, but if you have you know that vacant soulless look in its eyes, and I felt about that lake like you might feel looking into eyes like that shark…I looked up into the forest that stretched behind it and I felt the same way about the forest; I just didn't like it. It felt aware somehow. Waiting. The feeling about the water was what made me step back, turn around to my husband and tell him it was time to go. I can't adequately explain what happened, we weren't drinking, using any drugs, and I have no mental illnesses. The whole event lasted four or five seconds, then it was over; I felt a little afraid of what I’d almost done and I never forgot it. Since watching so many David Paulides videos and movies on missing people, and hearing so many accounts of people that “just wouldn't do that”…”it was totally out of character” or “they knew better” what happened to me at Crater Lake makes me always wonder if other people have been, oh, I guess the best word would be beckoned, or lured, in some unnameable way, somehow with the notion that what they were about to do was the right thing, the correct thing and inevitable in some sort of way. Pleasurable even, rewarding…Well, that's my strange account, I’ve felt that way about one or two other places in my 73 years on the planet, but that was one of the strangest! That isn't quite the end of my Crater lake tale, more strangeness waited 20 miles down the road, but that's another story for another time… I haven't told this particular story in over 40 years; why would I, and who’d believe it?

My experiences at Crater Lake were totally different. My father was a park ranger and they lived at the lake for 10+ years. We left the park in 1942 when I was 4 and my brother was 6. I still have home movies from that period and many good memories of return trips while I was growing up. I have one shot taken in the winter of 1951 or 52 showing the roadside snow bank at the rim village with 37 Ft. of snow. The 2 story log cabin that we lived in was at Annie Springs and sadly was demolished in later years to allow more space for roadway improvements.

I see martians, sasquatch, the loch ness monster, the blair witch, and the virgin mary every time i go to walmart. I just can't stay away.

My dad and mom when I was a small child use to take us to Crater lake camping all the time, I love Crater lake ❤️ I have never experienced anything weird 🤨

My wife and I visited Crater Lake. We lived in Oregon for a decade and nearly ended up living in the Crater Lake area but decided to move home to Kentucky. It's a beautiful place.

Crater Lake is one of the most amazing places to visit. I was in awe how blue the water is. Can't wait to go back.

All you have to do is take one look at crater lake and you know there are at least 5 lake monsters living down there

My family had a wonderful time there and swam in the lake. The only scary thing we experienced was hearing and seeing a large boulder roll down into the lake.

People get lost in rainforest areas over here (Australia) because they hear 'voices' in the forest. If you have ever been in a forest with a stream or creek around, the sound of the water running can sound like voices. I've been camped by a creek with a rocky base and the sounds from the water became very creepy at one point. I could swear I heard people talking upstream and went looking. Nothing. It was the stream talking to me... And thank you to @GoreTorn for the informative stuff about Crater lake. Legend.