About 20 years ago I did some fishing and hunting out past Estacada with this guy from work who grew up out there and he told me about all the cults out there and brutal activities they did in the forest there and it left me with a creepy feeling I’ve never got over. It’s a beautiful area out there but I always feel like whatever went down there hasn’t gone away, my imagination tells me the rocks and the trees have been there for hundreds and thousands of years and my take is they have seen it all and know the bad stories and when you get that creepy feeling it’s the rocks and trees talking to you trying to tell you what went down… something must have happened at Benson Plateau…
That is a very good way to put that feeling. aiwetir also had a good explanation. I've been a part of those feelings, both alone and with others. One time, my wife and I were walking a few hundred yards apart on two separate flats that had a thin run of trees between them. We could not see each other but we had walkie talkies. She said something about feeling weird, like something was watching us and that something was wrong. Over the radio, I laughed it off, but I stopped walking and stared in her direction because I had been feeling the same way for 10 minutes, just hadn't said anything. She was bothered and because of my feelings, I felt I should listen. I started walking back towards her and we had some fairly inexplicable, strange things happen shortly after. We eventually packed up our camp and headed back home a couple hours later instead of spending another night as planned. As we loaded the car, I sensed something watching us from one particular spot nearby in the forest. It was actually thin, without any brush or big trees. Nothing was there, but I couldn't take my eyes off that one spot. The compulsion to look was incredibly strong.
There is something to be said for locations absorbing energy, or ghosts/manifestations, or evolutionary memories, or our senses picking up current environmental stimuli that our brain doesn't quite know what to do with. Whichever of those things or combination of them, they lead to strange feelings. Those feelings are caused by something that we haven't quite been able to place our scientific finger on.