Not camping related, but out in the (semi) wilds.
About twenty years ago, I was once with a bunch of friends on some water towers (big earthworks enclosing water tanks maybe 40ft high with sloping grass banks). This was in farmland on the very edge of town, far from houses, . It was a quiet, warm summer night. We'd all been drinking, and were drunk, but not incapable. We were young and having a good time. We were happy, celebrating a friend's birthday. It was maybe one AM. I was sitting with a friend, looking out into the blackness, toward the distant lights of town, and my friend pointed out a strange white shape down in the dark at the base of the earthwork embankment. My first though was that it was a carrier bag caught on barbed wire, reflecting the moon. It just looked like a blur to me (I'm a bit short sighted and wasn't wearing my glasses). But it was bright enough to stand out, and stand out enough for mine and my friend's interest to be peaked. My friend said he was going to go down and see what it is, and me, braver then than now, and interested in this strange bright shape, decided to go down with him.
We slid down the steep bank keeping our eyes on our feet, watching out for rocks and broken glass. I hit the dirt path at the bottom first, and straightend up. As I did, I looked straight into the eyes of a woman on the other side of the stone wall, three or four feet away from me. She had her arms crossed on the top of the wall and what seemed like dungarees and a shirt on. she had shortish hair, cut in a fringe. I looked at her and felt the blood drain from me. I couldn't speak. Not only because I hadn't expected to see her there, but mainly because she was glowing pure white. The glow was so strong that it was reminiscent of the glow around those kids in the Ready Breck adverts. My friend landed beside me moments later and I could hear him inhale as he saw her. He looked at her and I looked at her, and then she said "Is Gareth up there with you?"
"No," my friend said.
I literally couldn't speak.
She asked again if Gareth was up there with us.
My friend told her he wasn't, and after a moment, asked where she was from. She didn't answer but asked again about Gareth. Next thing, my other friends, on hearing the talking, had joined us. There were now five of us down there. My friends were equally shocked, but after a moment, started asking her who she was, where she was from. One even asked if she wanted to come back up to the top of the towers with us. We talked to her for maybe five minutes, but it seemed like an hour, and all the time I was just staring at this etherial glow around her not believing what I was seeing. She kind of interacted with us, in that she said yes or no, but she never told us where she was from, didn;t tell us anything really, except for constanly going back to whether Gareth was with us. Then there was silence, and we all got really spooked. One of us said they were going back up, and we all bolted for the top. At the top, we looked back, and saw nothing. She was gone. We were suddenly edgy, and soon left.
The next day, we went back and had a look round. On the other side of the wall was cow pasture, churned up mud, deep, a large field leading to woodland - maybe four hundred yards. We couldn't work out how, if it were some trick - if someone had mastered a way of making themselves glow in the dark with a glow like a flourescent tube, they had been able to move across that field. It would have been such heavy going.
We met up with our other friends later that day, and talked over what we had seen and heard, and we'd all seen the same, and heard the same.
One of my friends was later talking to her mother, who told us that during the 70s, a girl and her boyfriend had been messing on a trials bike in the fields near the water towers, and had come off. The girl had been killed, but the boy had survived.
I've been over it a few times in my mind since then, and talked about it with other friends, who are scientific/sceptical. The first thing they said was, ahh well, you'd all been drinking. True, but I've been out drinking lots of times and have never seen anything like that. If mere alcohol intake was the case, I would have seen many more "ghosts" in my time. Then there was the theory that tracts of water can affect the brain in a certain way to induce ghost like images in the mind. I could buy that, if it had just been one of us, or if we had all seen a ghost but had seen different ghosts which spoke to some of us but not others, or if it did speak to all of us, said different things.
Of course, it could have been mass hallucination, but maybe if we'd been talking about ghosts around the campfire or something, but we'd not mentioned them.
I believe I and my friends saw a ghost, and I would swear on my eyesight that what I saw was inexplicable and could not have been faked. And until I can come up with some other rational explanation, that's what I will continue to believe.