Mate that sounds genuinely unsettling. The Ozarks has a serious reputation and most people don't even know about it, they just think of it as middle-of-nowhere America but there's a load of weird encounter reports that come out of those woods consistently.
What did it actually sound like though? Like footsteps, breathing, something else? Because there's a big difference between "large animal circling the tent" weird and "something that shouldn't exist" weird and I think most of us here know what the second one feels like even if we struggle to put it into words.
I've never camped anywhere that remote but I've had experiences at night in Norfolk that made me not want to go back to certain spots, so I get the feeling you're probably describing even without the details.
Post everything you can remember, even the stuff that seems boring or irrelevant. Sometimes the small details are the ones that actually matter.