You are deep in the bush, sharing an ecosystem with many animals. The animals outnumber you campers by orders of magnitude. Why would hearing noises in the bush at night be weird?
The footsteps close by is a sound I often get woken up by. Its often American toads. They are attracted to tents and tarps because there is usually a huge collection of flying insects around and under them. The external tent "fly" (ironic name), collects hundreds to thousands of flies underneath it on all my tents, buzzing around all the time. American toads are attracted to this, and will hop onto your tent fly, or crawl under the fly and climb up on the tent inner layer. Sometimes they slide off and you get a hilarious sliding sound, which will wake you with a start, until you get used to it. Toads will crawl into your vestibule to lap up the flies buzzing around your tent's mesh screen. Hopping toads sound like footsteps to me.
Other possibilities include: mice, voles, shrews, snakes, chipmunk, red squirrel, hare, lynx, weasel mink, marten, fisher, otter, beaver, fox, coyote, wolf, bear.
Owls will make crazy banshee wails, and that may freak you out until you get used to it. Bears do not sound like wailing banshees, so relax and embrace the banshee sound when it happens.
One time, I was kept awake all night with a lynx chasing hares around through the forest all around the tent. The hares would sometimes ricochet like a pinball off the tent, keeping me awake and giving me mini heart attacks just as I was falling to sleep again.
Several times I have had flying squirrels land on my tent with a big punchy sound, then slide off. When fast asleep, that is extremely startling.
One time a weasel set up its hunting rounds to crawl over and across my inner tent liner where I could see it through the gossamer light fabric above me. It ignored me and went about its rounds.
Been woken up by Ptarmigan in the arctic - now there is a unique sound. If you have never heard it, you will not believe birds can make a sound like that.
Been woken up several times by a moose walking through camp. One time it was sniffing my tent and snorting. That was actually scary, because I imagined at any moment a giant hoof with a thousand pounds behind it stomping me to pulp. I roared and the moose galloped off.
Muskox galloped through camp once near my tent in the sub-arctic. Grizzlies don’t make that hooves on turf sort of sound, so it was one of those pleasant sounds that was not hear attack material.
In my early career in southern Ontario, of course there were the raccoons which were no end of trouble, and make creepy horrible sounds.
I have had large animals brush against the tent several times and then go away, but never seen them. Might have been a black bear. Had to once scare a bear out of my camp with a bear banger because it had decided it was going to trash my canoe. It ripped up my portage yoke pad (maybe for the salt, maybe for sport).
My best absolutely non-mysterious, positive ID animal suddenly waking up sound was wolf pack howls just a few meters from my tent. That was in the arctic, and I am sure they were having a good laugh waking me up at 5 in the morning! Had several nice awakenings by packs of wolves maybe 100m-200m away in various places in the Boreal.
