At 12:30, on the morning of August 3, 2025, underneath the Bighorn Causeway, a group of six teenagers were sleeping soundly. Brendan Apostle, a teen from Red Lodge, lay scrolling on TikTok when he heard something stirring outside.
“It sounded like the cooler,” junior Tanner Seifert said. “Like the ice cooler was shaking.”
After this epiphany, Apostle and his tentmate, junior Broc Frank, started searching with flashlights from the safety of their tent. In the black abyss of the night, they heard a voice shout to them to turn their flashlights off. Assuming it was another member of their company, junior Benjamin Ostermiller, Frank and Apostle turned their flashlights off. Not seconds later, Frank said he felt something brush up against his leg.
“So, they ended up calling Ben, and they thought it was an animal,” Seifert said. “Ben had just woke up, so they thought, and they said they heard splashing down by the river.”
The scare the splashing caused amongst the three prompted them to wake up the rest of the group.
“So, we decided to turn on our flashlights and yelled,” Seifert said. “We yelled at it and we heard, like a really big splash, and then running, but we couldn’t tell which direction it was running in, so we all got up.”
Without knowing what it was or where it was running, the group woke up junior Sawyer Wormald, the last one still asleep, and fled to their vehicles.
“It was really scary,” Seifert said, describing how hard it was to “gain the courage and get out of our tents without knowing what it was.”
The group proceeded to load up and try and chase whatever was disturbing their night.
“So, we went to go and, like, try and see if we could find it,” Wormald said. “We could not find it, but when we turned around, because we came to a dead end, we saw something that looked like it was a flashlight. It was a flashlight at our camp.”
There was no explanation for the flash to be shining at their camp.
“I saw Broc shut the tent, and as we were returning, we all saw a light at our camp,” Seifert said. “As we drew closer, the light shut off, and when we returned, Broc’s tent was open.”
This is the point at which the group began to suspect something more sinister. An open tent, a light at camp, and the sound of running didn’t seem to indicate an animal’s presence.
“We are assuming it was a person, but we don’t have an exact idea,” Wormald said. “We’re pretty darn tootin’ it was a person.”
At this point in the night, the group packed up and left, going back to Ostermiller’s house. As if the whole scare at the causeway wasn’t enough, as they were driving away, the boys noticed a blaze of fire in the back of Ostermiller’s truck.
“Broc brought a stove that he welded that we could put a fire into and put a grate or something onto to cook food,” Wormald said. “We must have not put the fire out all the way, or the wind must’ve brought it back alive, because when we were driving, it came back alive basically and started burning some stuff in the back of Ben’s truck.”
After the fiasco with the fire, the group finally made it to Ostermiller’s house and analyzed what had happened.
“The scariest part was probably not knowing what it was and starting to put the facts together when we got to Ben’s house,” Wormald said. “Also, hearing Broc say that he closed his tent when it was wide open was pretty scary.”
When questioned about what the potential motive would’ve been for a person to invade the camp, Wormald admitted that a pack of hot dogs was missing from the inventory.
Coincidentally, five days later, a post on Facebook appeared about a person stealing from camps roughly five miles away from where the boys had been camping.
A person sneaking around camps, a missing pack of hot dogs, sounds like a story to me, or better– a summer scare.
